Word excel and powerpoint notes

Microsoft PowerPoint, Word, and Excel make it possible to do so much with regards to our jobs. The trio has something to offer for almost everyone. But, what exactly is the difference between PowerPoint, Word, and Excel, and what does each piece of software do? Let’s find out!

The main difference between PowerPoint, Word, and Excel is the purpose of each software. PowerPoint is used for making presentations. Excel is the most helpful for capturing, tracking, and analyzing data with the help of graphical charts. Word is used for creating documents such as reports and books.

But, there is a lot more to it and in this article, I’m going to talk about what each one does, the differences between the three, and finally, how can we leverage the power of the three applications by working with all of them together. So, keep reading!

A Quick Note Before We Begin – if you want to make jaw-dropping presentations, I would recommend using one of these Presentation Designs. The best part is – it is only $16.5 a month, but you get to download and use as many presentation designs as you like! I personally use it from time-to-time, and it makes my task of making beautiful presentations really quick and easy!

Although these three applications can be used in a way that all three work together, there are differences that set them apart. Each application is used for different tasks and in this section, that is what we are going to talk about. So, let’s get into it.

• PowerPoint is used to present data or talking points in a slide show format. Presentations are a great way to summarize information, a project report, learnings from a research study, and much more. Microsoft PowerPoint helps you to create presentations.

• Excel is used to manage and organize data. You can capture data, record information over time, and analyze the data by creating charts and graphs using that data.

• Microsoft Word is used to create detailed reports, brief summaries, proposals, and pretty much anything that requires a lot of text. This is because it is a word processor.

As you can see, each application has a different goal, and thus are designed to be different from each other. Obviously, if the goal or the objective of the software is different, there are bound to be several differences in the functionalities. That said, I shall not focus on the differences in the functionalities of the three applications as pretty much everything will be different.

What is Microsoft PowerPoint?

Microsoft PowerPoint is one of the most powerful tools that any company can use when it comes to meetings and presentations. PowerPoint uses a slide show method of giving presentations.

PowerPoint has a wealth of features that help professionals get their messages across to their colleagues or clients. We have a large library of articles that cover everything that you need to know about PowerPoint. So, after reading this article, why not go check some of them out.

How does PowerPoint work?

To use PowerPoint, you need to have Microsoft Office installed on your PC, laptop, or Mac. Most new machines come with Office pre-installed with no payment necessary. In some cases, you will only have a free trial and will need to buy a license key.

If you do not have Office at all, you can buy it from a retail store or online. Regardless of which method you choose, you will most likely need to download it. Here is a link to the Microsoft website where you will be able to download the MS Office Suite.

Once Office is installed, you will be able to open PowerPoint and start making presentations.

What is PowerPoint Used for?

PowerPoint is used for making slide show presentations. You may need a presentation for various reasons. For instance, you may want to create a presentation giving an overview of your organization, or a pitch presentation for your investors, or perhaps a summarized performance presentation for the annual report.

The purpose of creating a presentation can be endless. The type of presentations that you make depends on what your profession is. Below is a small indicative list of professions and what they use PowerPoint for.

• Salesperson: There is no better way for a salesperson to get a message across to their potential clients than a presentation.

• Entrepreneurs: They would use PowerPoint for the same reason as a salesperson would need presentations. If you have meetings to sell your service, product or to raise funding, a presentation can go a long way in helping.

• Managers: Managing a team of people is not easy. If you want to really make an impression on your team, why not use presentations? You could also use them when delivering reports to your peers or reporting managers.

• Public Speakers: This is the most common use of presentations. Using presentations is the best way to keep your audience engaged while you give an awe-inspiring speech.

Advantage of Using PowerPoint

The main advantage of using PowerPoint is that you can create intriguing and visually appealing presentations for your clients, boss, or a classroom of students. PowerPoint has a massive selection of features that allow you to create truly personalized representations of your data, product, or service.

Difference between PowerPoint and Word

For us to talk about the difference between PowerPoint and Word, the easiest way to do this would be to talk about what Word is and what it does first. Let’s get straight to it.

What is Microsoft Word?

MS Word is a word processor. It is part of the Microsoft Office suite. MS Word is the most commonly used application within all the offerings of MS Office. Here are some of the reasons why MS Word is so popular. This list should also help explain exactly what MS Word is used for –

• Microsoft Word used for creating large pieces of content, articles, or even blog posts.

• Microsoft Word is also used for creating detailed reports, writing summaries, capturing information about a research, etc.

• Word is also perfectly suited for filling out application for an award, circulating instructions for a questionnaire, and other business needs.

• Microsoft Word can also be used to write business proposals, business agreements and contracts, and other business related confidential documents, etc.

• It is also used within the educational domain to write anything from essays to speeches.

Key differences between PowerPoint and Word

The difference between Microsoft Word and PowerPoint is pretty big. While MS Word is used to create detailed documents, PowerPoint is used to present as much information with as little text as possible.

PowerPoint can be seen as a visual representation of data and MS Word is a text-based representation of data. Other than that, it is hard to mention other differences because they are completely different applications.

Difference between PowerPoint and Excel

We have already discussed, in some detail, what PowerPoint is. So, for this section, we will focus more on Excel and this should highlight what the differences are between the two. Let’s get straight to the point.

What is Microsoft Excel?

Excel is a program that is commonly used by accountants within a company. It can be used to manage any form of data that needs to be organized and managed. It can also be used to summarize data by creating graphs and charts.

Key differences between PowerPoint and Excel

There is one major difference between PowerPoint and Excel and that difference is the use of data.

Excel manages and organizes data and while you can turn the data into charts, Excel is not really the program that you want to use to present the data. PowerPoint is the better program for representing data.

You can use PowerPoint to present your Excel data. Let me share what I mean by that in our next section.

Using Microsoft PowerPoint, Word and Excel together

Now this is where everything gets interesting and to be honest, this is where the power of Microsoft Office really stands out. All the programs can be used together to create a smooth workplace that runs like clockwork. Here’s how  PowerPoint, Word, and Excel can be used together.

Using PowerPoint and Word Together

You can place your presentations inside of MS Word documents which can help to remove the tediousness of repeating the same points in your presentation in word. Here’s how to do it.

1. In PowerPoint go to the “Files” tab and select it. You should get a drop-down menu.

1. In the drop-down menu, select the “Export” option. You should get another drop-down menu.

1. Select “Create Handouts”. This will open a dialogue box.

1. Now, select what layout you want.

1. Paste the link directly into your Word document, and you are done!

Doing this will allow real-time changes within word if they are done in PowerPoint.

Using PowerPoint And Excel Together.

You can use PowerPoint to present your Excel data by creating a chart in PowerPoint and linking it to the Excel file. We have a full tutorial on this which you can read by clicking on the link below –

Final Thoughts

We have reached the end of this article. Hopefully, you have walked away with enough knowledge to impress your peers and understand the key differences between the three applications.

We discussed the differences between these three products and what they all do. Be sure to bookmark this page and keep up to date with all of our articles which are designed to make your work a lot easier.

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It happens more often than not that an idea we get at a particular moment is difficult to recall at the time we need it the most. No matter what we do that particular chain of thoughts would not come back and this gets more than frustrating at times.

At times like this investing in a pack of sticky notes seems like a great idea. However, sticky notes are not permanent, they tend to wander off and get lost over time. Also finding a pen or a pencil to jot down an idea or a thought can sometimes be a little too cumbersome.

Thanks to Note&Do you can have the best of both worlds. You can easily make quick notes and keep them attached to the relevant documents with the help of this amazing add-in. You can create notes and tasks in Word, Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint with Note&Do

The add-in can easily be installed and once that happen it integrates itself to the MS office suite. Two tabs namely Notes and To Do are readily visible on the right hand side of the application that you are running

Drag and drop

All you need to do is create a note simply by dragging and dropping text in the notes and to do bar that the add-in enables on the right hand side of any Microsoft Office suite’s component

Universal notes

All the notes that you create using the add-in are universal, in the sense that they can be viewed while you are working on any of the four components of MS office. This adds to the productivity since you have all the ideas in one place and can readily view them while you start working on it.

Customize your notes

The add-in is designed in a manner that enables quick creation and customization of your notes. You can actively change the color of the notes created and choose from the available options. Also, you can easily change the size of the notes by toggling the auto size option.

The user can also easily reposition or pin the notes that have been created in accordance with his or her convenience and based on the priority of the content that the notes carry.

Create a To Do list

The second tab named To-Do allows the users to create a task list. To add tasks all you need to do is double click anywhere in the window and the edit mode would start. The user can also categorize and customize the lists by changing colors of the created lists and styles of the text.

Compatibility

The add-in works perfectly with the following versions of Microsoft’s office suite: MSOffice 2003, MS Office 2007 and MS Office 2010 (both 34-bit a well as 64-bit versions).

Go to Download Note&Do

Chances are you’ve probably used a Microsoft Office product at some point in your life, but when you get to working a full-time job, you’d be surprised how complex using these programs can get. Suddenly your boss is talking about things like Mail Merge, functions and filters, and you have no idea what it means.

Don’t fear, recent grads, we’ve got you covered: I’ve constructed a guide to the top three Microsoft Office programs you’ll likely see at your job (Word, Excel and PowerPoint) and the helpful resources, tips and tricks that’ll make you seem like a pro as soon as you walk through the door.

Word

Ah, Microsoft Word. You type, fix your spacing and add some page numbers, right? To an extent, sure. However, there are a few underutilized features that will make your life easier and are key when collaborating on the same document.

Styles and Table of Contents

Styles can be used to make a document look cohesive and to put together a table of contents super easily (even if Microsoft makes it sound pretty hard in this article). All you have to do is highlight your section titles and assign them the appropriate heading or subheading style. Go to the Reference tab to insert your Table of Contents, and voila! Done.

Additionally, you’re not limited to styles that Microsoft Word has determined for you. To edit a style or create your own, right click on the style and click “Modify.” You can also go the Design tab, and choose from multiple preset themes that will change the formatting of all your headings.

Mail Merge

If you have to, for example, print 500 letters with everything the same except for the name of the recipient, be confident in knowing that there is an alternative to copying and pasting 500 times and going back to change the names. Mail Merge, though often associated with sending out multiple emails with different names to different email addresses, can also be used within Word to make multiple copies of the same document to print.

Track Changes

Say someone sends you a document to look over and edit for spelling, grammar and style. Professional etiquette demands the use of Track Changes (in the Review tab) in order to highlight the changes you’ve made so that the person you ultimately send it back to doesn’t have to have two versions of the document open to compare them side by side.

Excel

If you’re asked to put together any type of report, chances are you’re going to start off in Excel. Unless you studied something quantitative, it’s understandable that you wouldn’t spend so much time in Excel, and it can be intimidating.

The thing to know about using Excel in the workplace is that unless you’re some type of statistician, you’ll probably only need to know a few ways to manipulate or summarize data, which you’ll spend 20% of your time doing, and the other 80% is formatting it to make it look nice. Here’s a breakdown of the basic concepts you need to know.

Functions

Functions are used within a cell to either calculate or manipulate data. You know, things like SUM, PRODUCT, AVERAGE and COUNT. These can get complicated, especially if you’re doing multiple calculations at a time, so don’t forget your order of operations.

Additionally, there are functions like VLOOKUP, CONCATENATE and TODAY that will make your life so much easier but don’t come to mind naturally. Also, IF statements are really important pieces of logic to understand how to use to tell Excel, “If this cell says x, use the space in this cell to spit back y; otherwise spit back z.”

Features

Go ahead, click on those tabs up top; they won’t bite! Up here (A/N: the row of tabs and all the stuff in them is called the Ribbon) is a veritable treasure chest of tools that Excel has already built in. Some important ones to know:

• Pivot Tables (in the Data tab): A Pivot Table is a user-friendly way of summarizing large sets of data that might be downloaded from a payment system or an inventory tracking system. Pivot tables are super handy because they allow you to quickly choose the fields you want to compare against each other using the Row and Column Fields and summarize data using sums, averages and counts in ways that can be further manipulated to display as percents. It sounds complicated, but mastering Pivot Tables will save you tons of time and make you a star in the workplace!
• Evaluate Formula (in the Formulas tab): What happens when your super complicated formula is broken and you can’t figure out where you went wrong? Luckily, Excel includes something called Evaluate Formula that you can use to figure out exactly where your nested formula went wrong. (“Nested” means putting one formula inside of another, like Russian nesting dolls).
• Filters (in the Data tab): Highlight a list of data and press Filter. You can now not only sort alphabetically or numerically, but also limit what you’re seeing to whatever you want. If you’re filtering a long list of dates and don’t want to click on a month’s worth of individual dates, you can use “Date Filters” in the menu when you click the dropdown to narrow in on a range of dates. This works on numbers, too! Also, if you (or someone else) previously highlighted a few items to take a closer look at, you can filter by color to only see those cells that are highlighted.
• Text to Columns (in the Data tab): Did you download a .csv file and it came back looking;like;this;with;semicolons;instead;of;new;columns? Do you need to separate the airline and flight number of a bunch of flight codes? Enter Text to Columns, the answer to literally hours of mind-numbing copying and pasting. Text to Columns will ask you if you want to split up the text in your cell based on fixed width or a delimiter. Flight codes are 2 characters for the airline followed by a number, so you would use fixed width to tell Excel to split up your text after 2 characters. The CSV in .csv stands for “Comma-Separated Values,” but it’s not always separated by commas, confusingly. In the above example, the delimiter you would identify is a semicolon, essentially telling Excel, alright every time you see a semicolon, put everything after it in the next column.
• Freeze Panes (in the View tab): When you’ve scrolled so far you’ve forgotten what the fields you’re looking at even are, you need two things: 1) Coffee 2) Freeze Panes! Use this to keep your top row (or leftmost column, or whatever you want, really) in place while you scroll to your heart’s delight.

Formatting

Now that you have the calculations you want, you need to make it presentable! A lot can be done using colors and text formatters (bold, italic, etc) on the home tab, but some parts need further elaboration.

Charts

I’ll be the first to admit that Excel charts can be infuriating when Excel can’t read your mind about what you want your chart to look like. It helps to figure out some details beforehand:

• What kind of chart should you be using? Depending on what you’re trying to portray, you should find the correct chart to suit your purpose. This flowchart from The Extreme Presentation Method is a good start, and this paper from Tableau, an industry leader in data visualization (yes, this is an industry) goes further in depth.
  
• What fields are you plotting? How should you split up your data to make the most effective point? In my experience, the best and easiest way to do this is to make a Pivot Chart (the prettier cousin of the Pivot Table) and drag and drop rows and columns until you’ve found what you want. You can either just use this Pivot Chart or recreate it using a regular chart (regular charts are more flexible on the formatting).
  

After you determine these two, you should go ahead and make your chart. You can add or take away elements like data labels or trend lines by clicking on the Design tab that appears when you’ve clicked on your chart and clicking on “Add Chart Element.”

Conditional formatting: Looking at lots of numbers is generally unhelpful and occasionally nauseating, so when you add colors to direct the viewer’s eye to what’s important or out of the ordinary, it’s immensely helpful. Rather than go through each cell and select just the right shade of green for each cell (and then inevitably have to go back and change it), you can use conditional formatting to do your highlighting with the click of a button, and keep it dynamic based on revised calculations.

Keyboard Shortcuts

I highly recommend learning keyboard shortcuts to be able to navigate Excel more easily (and seem like an Excel wizard!). I won’t bother with Googling “Excel shortcuts” for you, but here are some absolute essentials [Mac options in brackets]:

• Ctrl/[Command] + Shift + [arrow key]: Highlight entire columns or rows of adjacent cell
• Ctrl/[Command] + Shift + v: Paste Value. If you’re copying from a formula and only want the value, not the formula, this is the shortcut to just get the number
• Ctrl/[Command] + Shift + t: Paste Format. Like I said, you’re going to spend a lot of time formatting!! To do this more efficiently, use this shortcut to copy and paste only the formatting from one range of cells to another.
• Ctrl/[Command] + PgUp/PgDn: Scroll quickly in between tabs of an Excel workbook.

With these tips at your disposal, you’re well on your way to becoming an Excel guru!

PowerPoint

When it comes to PowerPoint, the golden rule is less is more. In a professional setting, under no circumstances would you want the design of your presentation to overpower the content.

To that end, here are some tips to make sure that happens:

• Use the Slide Master. In the View tab, you can find this essential feature that will help keep your slides consistent and looking professional
• Use the Align tool. Objects that are almost aligned can be very distracting. The Align tool (in the Home tab) is a great trick to make sure your shapes and objects fall in line.
• Keep the context of who is viewing your slides and how they’re viewing them in mind when building. There are three main types of PowerPoint presentations you can make:
  • Presentation: Intended to be presented to one or more people, with heavy emphasis on diagrams and short phrases, so that the audience pays more attention to the presenter rather than trying to read the slide. Can be creative more so than informative since it’s meant to be presented and can have a higher number of slides if needed.
  • Deck: Designed to stand alone as a summary of a would-be presentation or a presentation that happened in the past. People should be able to read through it and understand all the main points of the presentation without having attended it.
  • Placemat: A one-slide detailed summary of the highlights of the idea being presented, not dissimilar to an infographic. Sometimes used during meetings but meant to be easily distributed without needing additional context or explanation.
• Make your presentation color-blind friendly, if it’s very visual. It can make or break your presentation for some people in the audience. Some tips here.
  

Armed with all these tips, there’s nothing Microsoft-related your boss can throw your way and faze you. You’ll probably be teaching your co-workers a thing or two instead of the other way around.

Cover image courtesy of WomeninTech Chat.