A Day As Documented

I think we can all agree that documenting a day in life is one of the oldest but constantly evolving things that a person does. That is the whole point of history, which can involve studying journals or first-hand accounts of events, blogging like I am here, making other content on platforms like YouTube or TikTok, even journaling your current state of mind (like I do!) can all be seen as documenting a day in your life. For an assignment, I had to do the same thing, but across the different platforms of the Microsoft Suite: PowerPoint, Word, and Excel. All recording different aspects, of course. 

Disclaimer: there are more suites than just the Microsoft Suite, and depending on which one you like to use, you can use any of them! One example is that Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, and Apple Numbers are all spreadsheet programs, but offer different value based upon the user. 

One of the purposes for this assignment was to find which one was the best one to use, but first we have to go and find the different advantages and disadvantages of these. Of course, each advantage and disadvantage varies, but they also have some things in common too. For example, all these applications have a plethora of features that make each one easy to use and understand, and in some cases make it fun to create something with them. However, there are some things that make an author work a little bit harder to use them. For starters, while Word is great to use for a lot of use cases, the application itself can be a little overwhelming, solely because of how many features are presented when opening the application. While useful for their own purposes, like adding a little bit of flair to a paper, they make the application harder to navigate and some features harder to find. The search bar also does not work well in some cases, and the help function only has a couple of things it actually helps with. Excel is kind of the same way, where it is great with collecting data and presenting it, but it also tends to be a little bit confusing for the sheer number of features that come with it. While it is simpler to use once it is learned, there are a lot of ways to do one function. For example, if you want to change the title of a column on a data table, you can type it out in the box itself, or navigate to the bar at the top to type out the title as well. Much like Word, the help tab and search function are useful in some cases, but not very user-friendly. PowerPoint is arguably the easiest one to use for me, and is also probably the most widely used application out of the three. This one is self-explanatory, and everything is labelled at the top with relevant features to the titles of the different tabs. The one thing that made this application a little difficult was the amount of themes to use. There are two different types of themes to choose from, the Microsoft-generated themes and the community-created themes, with an option to create your own. The only thing that is difficult about the community made themes is that they are pretty difficult to find and apply. 

Now that we got that out of the way, which one was the best to use? For me, it was PowerPoint! To me, being able to express myself the way I did with my PowerPoint presentation really captured my personality, and I was able to add some pretty funny animations for the text to appear or pictures to fly in, and I think it works best when trying to explain a day in your life.