Application Software (Word Processor, Spreadsheet, DBMS, Presentation Graphics, web browser, Personal information management)

Application software is a program or group of programs designed for end users. These programs are divided into two classes: system software and application software. While system software consists of low-level programs that interact with computers at a basic level, application software resides above system software and includes applications such as database programs, word processors and spreadsheets. Application software may be bundled with system software or published alone.

Application software may simply be referred to as an application.

Different types of application software include:

1. Application Suite

Has multiple applications bundled together. Related functions, features and user interfaces interact with each other.

2. Enterprise Software

Addresses an organization’s needs and data flow in a huge distributed environment.

3. Enterprise Infrastructure Software

Provides capabilities required to support enterprise software systems.

4. Information Worker Software

Addresses individual needs required to manage and create information for individual projects within departments.

5. Content Access Software

Used to access content and addresses a desire for published digital content and entertainment.

6. Educational Software

Provides content intended for use by students.

7. Media Development Software

Addresses individual needs to generate and print electronic media for others to consume.

Word Processor

A word processor is software or a device that allows users to create, edit, and print documents. It enables you to write text, store it electronically, display it on a screen, modify it by entering commands and characters from the keyboard, and print it.

Of all computer applications, word processing is the most common. Today, most word processors are delivered either as a cloud service or as software that users can install on a PC or mobile device.

Standard Features of Word Processors

Word processors vary considerably, but all word processors, whether cloud-based or installed on a system, support the following basic features:

(i) Insert text: Allows you to insert text anywhere in the document.

(ii) Delete text: Allows you to erase characters, words, lines, or pages.

(iii) Cut and Paste: Allows you to remove (cut) a section of text from one place in a document and insert (paste) it somewhere else.

(iv) Copy: Allows you to duplicate a section of text.

(v) Page Size and Margins: Allows you to define various page sizes and margins, and the word processor will automatically readjust the text so that it fits.

(vi) Search and Replace: Allows you to direct the word processor to search for a particular word or phrase. You can also direct the word processor to replace one group of characters with another everywhere that the first group appears.

(vii) Word Wrap: Automatically moves to the next line when you have filled one line with text, and it will readjust text if you change the margins.

(viii) Print: Allows you to send a document to a printer to get hard copy.

(ix) File management: Provides file management capabilities that allow you to create, delete, move, and search for files.

(x) Font Specifications: Allows you to change fonts within a document. For example, you can specify bold, italics, and underlining. Most word processors also let you change the font size and even the typeface.

(xi) Windows: Allows you to edit two or more documents at the same time. Each document appears in a separate window. This is particularly valuable when working on a large project that consists of several different files.

(xii) Spell Checking: Identifies words that don’t appear in a standard dictionary.

Spreadsheet

A spreadsheet or worksheet is a file made of rows and columns that help sort data, arrange data easily, and calculate numerical data. What makes a spreadsheet software program unique is its ability to calculate values using mathematical formulas and the data in cells. A good example of how a spreadsheet may be utilized is creating an overview of your bank’s balance.

A spreadsheet is a computer application for organization, analysis and storage of data in tabular form. Spreadsheets were developed as computerized analogs of paper accounting worksheets. The program operates on data entered in cells of a table. Each cell may contain either numeric or text data, or the results of formulas that automatically calculate and display a value based on the contents of other cells. A spreadsheet may also refer to one such electronic document.

Spreadsheet users can adjust any stored value and observe the effects on calculated values. This makes the spreadsheet useful for “what-if” analysis since many cases can be rapidly investigated without manual recalculation. Modern spreadsheet software can have multiple interacting sheets, and can display data either as text and numerals, or in graphical form.

Besides performing basic arithmetic and mathematical functions, modern spreadsheets provide built-in functions for common financial and statistical operations. Such calculations as net present value or standard deviation can be applied to tabular data with a pre-programmed function in a formula. Spreadsheet programs also provide conditional expressions, functions to convert between text and numbers, and functions that operate on strings of text.

Spreadsheets have replaced paper-based systems throughout the business world. Although they were first developed for accounting or bookkeeping tasks, they now are used extensively in any context where tabular lists are built, sorted, and shared.

LANPAR, available in 1969, was the first electronic spreadsheet on mainframe and time sharing computers. LANPAR was an acronym: LANguage for Programming Arrays at Random. VisiCalc was the first electronic spreadsheet on a microcomputer, and it helped turn the Apple II computer into a popular and widely used system. Lotus 1-2-3 was the leading spreadsheet when DOS was the dominant operating system. Excel now has the largest market share on the Windows and Macintosh platforms. A spreadsheet program is a standard feature of an office productivity suite; since the advent of web apps, office suites now also exist in web app form. Web based spreadsheets are a relatively new category.

DBMS

A database management system (DBMS) is a software package designed to define, manipulate, retrieve and manage data in a database. A DBMS generally manipulates the data itself, the data format, field names, record structure and file structure. It also defines rules to validate and manipulate this data.

A DBMS relieves users of framing programs for data maintenance. Fourth-generation query languages, such as SQL, are used along with the DBMS package to interact with a database.

Some other DBMS examples include:

• MySQL
• SQL Server
• Oracle
• dBASE
• FoxPro

A database management system receives instruction from a database administrator (DBA) and accordingly instructs the system to make the necessary changes. These commands can be to load, retrieve or modify existing data from the system.

A DBMS always provides data independence. Any change in storage mechanism and formats are performed without modifying the entire application. There are four main types of database organization:

(i) Relational Database

Data is organized as logically independent tables. Relationships among tables are shown through shared data. The data in one table may reference similar data in other tables, which maintains the integrity of the links among them. This feature is referred to as referential integrity – an important concept in a relational database system. Operations such as “select” and “join” can be performed on these tables. This is the most widely used system of database organization.

(ii) Flat Database

Data is organized in a single kind of record with a fixed number of fields. This database type encounters more errors due to the repetitive nature of data.

(iii) Object-Oriented Database

Data is organized with similarity to object-oriented programming concepts. An object consists of data and methods, while classes group objects having similar data and methods.

(iv) Hierarchical Database

Data is organized with hierarchical relationships. It becomes a complex network if the one-to-many relationship is violated.

Presentation Graphics

Presentation graphics is any graphic used during a presentation in place of data. A good example is a graphic of a chart, rather than the actual data it represents.

Business graphics, charts and diagrams used in a presentation. Presentation graphics software provides predefined backgrounds and sample page layouts to assist in the creation of computer-driven slide shows, which, in combination with a data projector, made the 35mm slide presentation obsolete. Navigation from page to page (slide to slide) can be done manually or automatically every so many seconds. The most popular presentation software is Microsoft PowerPoint (see PowerPoint). Frames and Transitions The format is a series of horizontal frames (slides) with transitions between them. Images, text, audio and video are laid out on the frames, and speaker’s notes can be added. Like any page layout program, elements on a frame can be moved around and resized.

Web Browser

 A web browser (commonly referred to as a browser) is a software application for accessing information on the World Wide Web. When a user requests a particular website, the web browser retrieves the necessary content from a web server and then displays the resulting web page on the user’s device.

A web browser is not the same thing as a search engine, though the two are often confused. For a user, a search engine is just a website, such as Google Search, Bing, or DuckDuckGo, that stores searchable data about other websites. However, to connect to a website’s server and display its web pages, a user must have a web browser installed.

Web browsers are used on a range of devices, including desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones. In 2019, an estimated 4.3 billion people used a browser. The most used browser is Google Chrome, with a 64% global market share on all devices, followed by Safari with 17%.

Personal information management (PIM)

Personal information management (PIM) is the activities people perform in order to acquire, organize, maintain, retrieve, and use personal information items such as documents (paper-based and digital), web pages, and email messages for everyday use to complete tasks (work-related or not) and fulfill a person’s various roles (as parent, employee, friend, member of community, etc.). More simply, PIM is the art of getting things done in our lives through information.

Practically, PIM is concerned with how people organize and maintain personal information collections, and methods that can help people in doing so. People may manage information in a variety of settings, for a variety of reasons, and with a variety of types of information. For example, an office worker might manage physical documents in a filing cabinet by placing them in folders organized alphabetically by project name, or might manage digital documents in folders in a hierarchical file system. A parent might collect and organize photographs of their children into a photo album using a temporal organization scheme, or might tag digital photos with the names of the children.

PIM considers not only the methods used to store and organize information, but also is concerned with how people retrieve information from their collections for re-use. For example, the office worker might re-locate a physical document by remembering the name of the project and then finding the appropriate folder by an alphabetical search. On a computer system with a hierarchical file system, a person might need to remember the top-level folder in which a document is located, and then browse through the folder contents to navigate to the desired document. Email systems often support additional methods for re-finding such as fielded search (e.g., search by sender, subject, date). The characteristics of the document types, the data that can be used to describe them (meta-data), and features of the systems used to store and organize them (e.g. fielded search) are all components that may influence how users accomplish personal information management.

Studying, understanding, and practicing PIM can help individuals and organizations work more effectively and efficiently, can help people deal with “information overload”, and can highlight useful strategies for archiving, organizing, and facilitating access to saved information.