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Microsoft Office is an amalgamation of several Microsoft products, described below.
Word is the most popular word-processing program in the world. It is used frequently by students, faculty, and staff at Carleton for creating documents of all kinds. Its file format, .doc, is the most commonly used format for exchanging documents via e-mail and COLLAB.
Excel is a spreadsheet program with several built-in statistical capabilities, making it frequently used in all of the sciences and social sciences.
PowerPoint is a program for making presentations, such as slideshows. It is often used to provide a visual backdrop for lectures and project presentations.
Outlook (only available for Windows) is an e-mail program with several built-in organizing features, including an address book and calendar. Due to its track record of security problems, the SCIC does not recommend Outlook as an e-mail client. Instead, Carleton provides Mulberry.
Entourage (only available for OS X) is a new program of Office 2004 for Mac, taking many of the features of Outlook and integrating them into a program more oriented toward Mac users.
The latest version of Office for Windows is Office 2003. The latest version of Office for OS X is Office 2004.
In the past, there have been some glitches when transferring Office documents from Macs to Windows machines, and vice versa. These issues usually stem from using fonts that are installed under one operating system but not the other. In Office 2004, Microsoft has added a tool designed to check documents for compatibility with Windows computers. However, the SCIC does not yet have experience using this tool.
The latest version of Office is installed on all public lab computers.
The popularity and high price of Office have driven the development of many alternatives, which seek compatibility with Office. The SCIC cannot provide technical support for these alternatives, but many students do use them.
- OpenOffice (site) is a full-featured open-source equivalent to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, available for all major operating systems. However, there are known compatibility issues with formatting being skewed when opening OpenOffice documents with Microsoft Office. OpenOffice is installed on all Computer Science lab computers.
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