Week 5- Muddy

Confused about Excel?

Technology is changing the world. And although technology is making tasks easier for us, getting to know how to use the technology is not always easy. Microsoft Excel is a program that more and more people are using in a variety of fields. Excel is a spreadsheet program that has become an essential part of the business environment. Because Excel can do so many complex things, I have found it confusing sometimes just to figure out how to get it started on the simple things I want it to do. Often times after multiple attempts of trying to apply formulas, I end up manually doing the calculations and then typing them in. After studying the Excel program some, I found these tasks to be much easier than before.



Once you learn what you are doing, Excel will make your business life so much easier. Formulas in Excel can be very helpful. To make a formula type an equals sign in your cell. Then simply tell the computer what formula you want to perform. For example, if you want the sum of cell A1 and cell B1, in another cell type =A1+B1. Excel will do the calculation for you. If you want to do this function for multiple cells, you can drag to copy the formula to other cells too. Excel follows the order of operations. The order in which it performs calculations is parentheses, exponents, multiplication, division, addition, and then subtraction. Excel also has functions. Some of the more common Excel functions are AVERAGE, MIN, MAX, COUNT, and SUM. In a cell click the equals sign, select one of these functions, and then select a range of data. Learning how to work in Excel can really be beneficial.   

Week 4- Clear

Application software are the programs on your computer that you use everyday. These types of software perform functions that are designed to assist users with personal tasks. It is especially important in the business environment to have a good understanding of the different types of application software. Business application software includes programs like word processing, spreadsheets, databases, and management programs. Graphics and multimedia are another category of application software. There is personal/home software which are programs to help people with finances, taxes, entertainment, editing, and things like that. Communications, which is web browsing, email, blogging, instant messaging and so on, are also a major category of application software. click here for more categories

Application software can be categorized as either horizontal applications or vertical applications. Horizontal applications refers to programs used in all different industries and by all different people for multiple different uses. An example of a horizontal type of application software is the web browser Internet Explorer. This software can be used by a scientist to do research, a professional baseball player to look up stats, or by a kid to play a computer game.  On the other hand, vertical application software are designed to meet the specific needs of a particular market. An example of this could be a Walmart point-of-sales system. This would be a systems designed specifically for managing the retail of  Walmart merchandise.

Week 3- Clear

When people have an object that is no longer useful to them they throw it away. Although this may seem logical, it is not always the proper solution. Personal computers should not just be trashed when the owner doesn't need it anymore. Computers contain metals and chemicals that are hazardous to the environment. They should be taken or shipped to professionals that know how to properly recycle and dispose computer parts. Another option for someone who is getting rid of their old computer to change to an upgrade is to donate it. In this situation, the old saying "one man's trash is another man's treasure" could be true.

Find A Company Near You That Recycles Electronics

A very important factor to keep in mind when getting rid of a computer is that the computer still contains your information. It is especially important to clear the data from your computer before giving it away. Personal information, private business files, images, and everything that could be saved on your personal computer needs to be erased. A hardware system that is made to protect your disposed information is Darik's Boot and Nuke (DBAN) Link to DBAN. This overwrites computer data over three times so that information cannot be seen. If your hard drive is a magnetic disk, getting it degaussed makes information irretrievable. Other ways to protect your work would be to burn or cross-cut shred your memory hardware.

Week 2- Muddy

Most people in today's society know how to use a personal computer, but most people do not know the different components that make up the computer. I found computer hardware to be somewhat of a difficult concept to understand. I think what makes this subject challenging is that to gain a true understanding of the material it will take years of studying and learning. So I can only scratch the surface of the concepts about how a computer's hardware works because by trying to get a deeper understanding, I get into things that are over my head.

Although computer hardware is a subject that can be tough to learn, after watching some lectures and doing other research I have a better understanding of the components of a computer. First, there are the obvious harware parts of a computer like the monitor, the keyboard, and the mouse. Inside the computer there are more parts that are stored on the motherboard. One of those parts is the CPU or central processing unit. This is the peice that syncs all of the computer functions. Processor cores read and run program information. Computers today often have dual and multiple cores. A turbo boost is the computers way of saving energy by only running the necessary core processors. Another way the computer saves energy is through caches. Caches remember recent and frequently used data. A computers memory is stored in its RAM and video can be connected through things like VGA and HDMI.

Week 1: Clear

The internet. It is where this generation finds the answers to all of their questions. For example, "Where is the nearest mall? When is that assignment due? How do I get season tickets? What is my favorite celebrity doing at this very moment?" The internet is a tool that gives an individual access an unimaginable amount of information. Search engines and subject directories are how a computer narrows down the massive expanse of data to give each person exactly what they are looking for. 

Search engines are an essential part of the internet. General search engines use "bots" to collect data from the web. These bots index and sort the data so that information can be found quickly. Then, when a person is looking for something, they type in keywords about their topic of interest and the search engine gives them different websites that contain those keywords. There are general search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing that basically search the entire web. You can narrow your search by using search engines that search only specific areas. For example, you can search videos, images, news, and search engines.

Search Engine- Google

Another type of information search is subect directories. Sometimes using general search engines can leave you with hundreds of pages of irrelevant results. Computers are only machines, but the human mind can process and analyse information. Subject directories are internet data sorted and organized by actual people. Therefore, these searches often give more selective and related matches.

Subject Directory- Google