1 INTRODUCTION OF INTEGRATED SOFTWARE

APPLICATION
Integrated software is a collection of software especially created
to work on closely related programs. These are used in personal computers
where the most commonly used and most similar programs are grouped
together in one application in the form of a suite. One of the most well-
known examples of an integrated software suite is Microsoft Office, which
comprises programs used in an office environment.
Integrated software is largely believed to be only office software,
but that is not the case. Industrial management software and databases
fall into the category of integrated software, where the output from
various programs are closely related and can be embedded into each other
with similar environments. Computing has been revolutionized using
integrated software due to the fact that software is interconnected with
little or no chance of information error because files can be imported
with no need for conversion and no clash of formats.

What Is Application Software?

Computer software is the set of instructions and data that tells a
computer what to do and how to do it. Software provides instructions to
your computer’s hardware. Without it, your PC or Mac would be little more
than a large paperweight. But software actually comes in three main types:
system software, programming software and application software. System
software includes all the stuff that makes up a computer's operating
system (OS), including device drivers, configuration files and other key
system components. This is the software that tells the computer’s hardware
what to do and provides a foundation for the system. Programming software,
or middleware, works much like the plumbing in your home by invisibly
keeping things running behind the scenes. Application software, however,
is the most important type for computer users because it is used to
achieve many of the tasks that make us turn to our computers in the first
place, such as word processing, web browsing and data crunching.
Microsoft Office is a suite of desktop productivity applications
that is designed specifically by Microsoft for business use. It is a
proprietary product of Microsoft Corporation and was first released in
1990. For decades, MS Office has been a dominant model in delivering
modern office-related document-handling software environments.
The core components of Microsoft Office are the six items present in
the original package, notwithstanding the later addition of services like
OneDrive and SharePoint and a web design tool called FrontPage.

The six core programs in Microsoft Office are:

1. Word
2. Excel
3. PowerPoint
4. Access
5. Publisher
The Word, Excel and PowerPoint applications in Microsoft Office are
familiar household names, even to people who are not familiar with the
details of the Office suite’s evolution. They are often used by a diverse
user base, for example, college students, interns, or front line workers
in IT. By contrast, someone may use Word, Excel and PowerPoint frequently,
and rarely or never use Access, Publisher.

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The three major Microsoft Office pieces include the word processor
(Word), the spreadsheet (Excel) and the visual presentation tool
(PowerPoint.)

What Does Microsoft Word Mean?

Microsoft Word is a widely used commercial word processor designed
by Microsoft. Microsoft Word is a component of the Microsoft Office suite
of productivity software, but can also be purchased as a stand-alone
product.

Microsoft Word was initially launched in 1983, and has since been
revised numerous times. It is available for both Windows and Apple
operating systems.
Microsoft Word is often called simply Word or MS Word.
In 1981, Microsoft hired Charles Simonyi to develop a word-processing
application. The first version was released in 1983.

Initially, MS Word was not very popular, owing to its radically

different look compared to WordPerfect, the leading word processor at that
time. However, Microsoft improved Word continually over the years,
including a 1985 version that could run on a Mac. The second major release
of Word, in 1987, included an upgrade of major features, in addition to
new functionalities such as support for rich text format (RTF).

In 1995, Microsoft increased its market share in the word processor

business with the release of Windows 95 and Office 95, which offered a
bundled set of office productivity software.

Some features that have made MS Word useful include a WYSIWYG (what-
you-see-is-what-you-get) display: this design ensures that everything
displayed on screen appears the same way when printed or moved to another
format or program. The ability of users to copy and paste MS Word content
into many other platforms without significant formatting loss is one
reason the software has stayed so popular in the last two decades.

In addition, MS Word has a built-in dictionary for spell checking;

misspelled words are marked with a red squiggly underline. MS Word offers
text-level features such as bold, underline, italic and strike-through,
and page-level features such as indentation, paragraphing and
justification. Word is compatible with many other programs, the most
common being the other members of the Office suite.

In 2007, .docx became the default file format, replacing the “.doc”
extension.

As Microsoft Word modernized over time, so did Microsoft operating

systems. Since the Microsoft Office suite is inherently tied to the
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Microsoft operating system, its use featured in user frustrations around
end-of-life for Microsoft XP and the successive Vista and Windows 7, 8 and
10 additions.

At the same time, Microsoft was getting on the cloud bandwagon. Its
new offering, Microsoft Office 365, replaces old out of the box or single
machine licensing methods with a cloud-delivered set of software
applications that users can access from anywhere.

With subscription pricing, many customers are now accessing

Microsoft Word and Office suites through office 365 instead of buying it
through downloads with license keys. Theoretically, the cloud-delivered
method allows for more versatile use on multiple devices, although some
users have reported trouble trying to get new devices authorized.

Microsoft Excel

What Does Microsoft Excel Mean?

Microsoft Excel is a software program produced by Microsoft that
allows users to organize, format and calculate data with formulas using a
spreadsheet system.

This software is part of the Microsoft Office suite and is

compatible with other applications in the Office suite. Like other
Microsoft Office products, Microsoft Excel can now be purchased through
the cloud on a subscription basis through Office 365.

MS Excel is a commercial spreadsheet application that is produced

and distributed by Microsoft for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS operating
systems. It features the ability to perform basic calculations, use
graphing tools, create pivot tables and create macros, among other useful
features.

Spreadsheet applications such as MS Excel use a collection of cells

arranged into rows and columns to organize and manipulate data. They can
also display data as charts, histograms and line graphs.

MS Excel permits users to arrange data in order to view various

factors from different perspectives. Microsoft Visual Basic is a
programming language used for applications in Excel, allowing users to
create a variety of complex numerical methods. Programmers are given an
option to code directly using the Visual Basic Editor, including Windows
for writing code, debugging and code module organization.

History and Future of MS Excel

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In the early days of accessible PC business computing, Microsoft
Excel played a central role in bookkeeping and record-keeping for
enterprise operations.

One of the best examples of a use case for MS Excel is a table with
an autosum format.

It's very easy in Microsoft Excel to simply enter a column of values

and click into a cell at the bottom of the spreadsheet, and then click the
“autosum” button to allow that cell to add up all of the numbers entered
above. This takes the place of the manual ledger counts that had been a
labor-intensive part of business previous to the evolution of the modern
spreadsheet.

The autosum and other innovations have made MS Excel a must-have for
various kinds of enterprise computing, including looking at daily, weekly
or monthly numbers, tabulating payroll and taxes, and other kinds of
similar business processes.

Various types of simple use cases made Microsoft Excel a key end-
user technology as well, useful in training and professional development.
For a number of years, MS Excel has been included in basic business
diploma courses on business computing, and temporary work agencies may
assess individuals on their skills with Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel
for a wide range of clerical duties.

However, as the world of business technology has advanced, Microsoft

Excel has become largely obsolete in some ways.

The reason for this is a concept called “visual dashboard”

technology or “data visualization.”

Generally, companies and vendors have come up with neat new ways to
present data visually that do not involve end users looking at a
traditional spreadsheet with columns of numbers and identifiers. Instead,
they look at graphs and charts and other sophisticated presentations, to
understand the numbers better and more quickly. People have realized that
the visual presentation is far easier to “read.”

The principle of data visualization has shifted the use cases for
Microsoft Excel. Where businesses may have used Microsoft Excel in the
past for, say, hundreds of records, most of today's business use cases
involve spreadsheets that handle less than a few dozen values for any
particular project.

Microsoft PowerPoint

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Microsoft PowerPoint is a powerful presentation software developed
by Microsoft. It is a standard component of the company's Microsoft Office
suite software, and is bundled together with Word, Excel and other Office
productivity tools.

The program uses slides to convey information rich in multimedia and

is used to create complex business presentations, simple educational
outlines and much more.
PowerPoint was developed by Dennis Austin and Thomas Rudkin at Forethought
Inc. It was supposed to be named Presenter, but the name was not adapted
due to trademark issues. It was renamed PowerPoint in 1987 as suggested by
Robert Gaskins.

In August of 1987, Microsoft bought Forethought for $14 million and

turned it into its graphics business unit, where the company continued to
develop the software. The first iteration was launched together with
Windows 3.0 in 1990. It only allowed slide progression in one direction –
forward – and the amount of customization was fairly limited.

Although it was conceived only for Macintosh computers in the very

beginning, PowerPoint quickly became one of the most iconic trademarks and
the first important acquisition of Microsoft. Even today, it holds up to
95 percent of the market share of presentation software.

PowerPoint allows users to create media-rich presentations

constituted by a series of slides. Since it’s fully integrated with the
other tools of the Microsoft Office suite, the user can import content
created with Excel or Word into PowerPoint, as well as other media such as
pictures, audio, and video clips.

To create slides, a series of templates are used to provide the user

with pre-defined layouts for different purposes. Once the theme that will
be used in the presentation is set by defining a standard font, background
color, and layout, that slide is saved as “master slide.” The user can
either change each other slide accordingly, or edit the master slide to
propagate the change to all the other slides uniformly.

During a PowerPoint presentation, the presenter has the liberty to

define the pace by controlling the flow manually or having the slide swap
at preset intervals, which may also be different for each slide.
Individual elements on a slide may also appear after a certain command is
issued, such as bullet points or videos.

PowerPoint experienced a very significant change in PowerPoint 97,

which added predefined transition effects and allowed the user to time
them appropriately so that slides would transition automatically. This
allowed a presenter to follow a predefined progression and go on with the
presentation without pausing to change or read the slides. PowerPoint 2007
introduced the "ribbon" interface, marking a drastic change from the
previous interface style.

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In older versions of PowerPoint, presentations were saved only as a

standard .pptx format. However, newer versions from 2013 and 2016 allow
the users to save presentations in different common formats such as
pictures (JPEG, GIF, PNG, etc.), videos (WMV or MPEG-4), or text (PDF).

Microsoft Access

Microsoft Access is a pseudo-relational database engine from

Microsoft. It is part of the Microsoft Office suite of applications that
also includes Word, Outlook and Excel, among others. Access is also
available for purchase as a stand-alone product. Access uses the Jet
Database Engine for data storage.
Access is used for both small and large database deployments. This
is partly due to its easy-to-use graphical interface, as well as its
interoperability with other applications and platforms such as Microsoft’s
own SQL Server database engine and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA).

The Access Jet engine supports most database features, such as

referential integrity, row-level locking and multiuser support with up to
255 concurrent user connections. Access is well-suited for creating small
databases such as those used by single departments. It is not suitable for
larger, enterprise-level databases. For these, Microsoft offers its SQL
Server database engine.

Access was first released as version 1.0 in November 1992. The

software was fine while working with small databases but in larger files
there was the danger of data corruption. With each release of Office,
Microsoft has also included a newer version of Access, each of which
includes new or updated features.

With the release of Access 2007, the database file format changed
from the previous “.mdb” to “.accdb”. This new format supports more
complex data types, but unfortunately is not compatible with prior
versions of the Access software. This is analogous to the new “.docx” and
“.xlsx” formats in Word and Excel, which are also incompatible with the
pre-2007 versions of these programs.

Microsoft Publisher

Microsoft Publisher is a graphic design application that is similar

to Microsoft Word but differs in the fact that its emphasis lies more on
page layout and design, and less on word composition and formatting. It
provides easy-to-use and less expensive publishing options for creating

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designs and logos for small businesses, where using other high end
applications may not be feasible.
Microsoft Publisher is an entry-level graphic design program
included in some versions of Microsoft Office. It is considered ideal for
small business because it is user friendly and does not demand prior
knowledge about the application or graphic design in general. Publisher
includes templates for many types of common business needs, such as
business cards, brochures, address labels and calendars. Microsoft offers
the options to directly mail the file, export it as another file type or
upload it to the cloud and publish online.

Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop is software that is extensively used for raster

image editing, graphic design and digital art. It makes use of layering to
allow for depth and flexibility in the design and editing process, as well
as provide powerful editing tools, that when combined, are capable of just
about anything.

It was created by brothers Thomas and John Knoll in 1988. In 1989,

John sold the program to Adobe Systems, which marketed it as “Photoshop.”
Since then, the program has become the de facto industry standard for
raster graphics editing. It is published for both macOS and Windows, but
not Linux.

Adobe Photoshop was originally developed in 1987 by Thomas and John

Knoll, and then Adobe Systems Inc. bought the license to distribute in
1988. Thomas, then in school for his PhD at the University of Michigan,
wrote a program on his Macintosh Plus that basically displayed images on a
screen and called it Display. His brother John, an employee at industrial
Light & Magic, convinced him to make it into a full program. They began to
collaborate on it and eventually called it Photoshop, since ImagePro was
already taken. They made a short-term deal with Barneyscan, a scanner
manufacturer, to distribute copies of the program with a slide scanner
they were selling; Photoshop shipped 200 copies this way.

John eventually did a demonstration to Apple and Russell Brown, who

was then art director at Adobe. Adobe decided to purchase the license to
distribute in 1988. Photoshop 1.0 was released on February 19, 1990 and
was exclusive for Macintosh. Each Photoshop release improved upon the
last, and it quickly became the standard in digital photo editing.

Photoshop is specifically designed to allow users to create and edit

raster images in multiple layers. These overlays or layers can support
transparency and can also act as masks or filters that can alter
underlying images in the layers below them. Shadows and other effects such
as alpha compositing can be applied. It is also possible of apply several
color models to these layers – CMYK, RGB, Spot Color, and Duotone and Lap
color space.

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The default file extension for a work in progress is called .PSD

(Photoshop Document). A PSD file has a maximum of 30,000 pixels for width
and height and a file length limit of 2 gigabytes. Another type of
Photoshop file is .PSB (Photoshop Big) – it is a large document format and
extends the PSD’s maximum height and width limit to 300,000 pixels and
also extends the length limit to around 4 exabytes

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