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2.3 Software: Your Tools for Success

Presentation Software

If at some point in your academic or professional life you need to give a speech or make a
public presentation, you will use presentation software. Modern presentation software has
revolutionized the possibilities for sharing information with an audience. It gives students,
teachers, and business professionals a way to easily use text, graphics, animation, sound, and
video to deliver educational, informative, and entertaining presentations. With this software,
you can create electronic slides that display text and incorporate multimedia (text, graphics,
and sound) and links to websites. These slides can be shared with others as attachments to an
e-mail; they can be printed; or, with a laptop and a projector, they can be displayed on a large
screen to create a visual presentation.

Microsoft PowerPoint is required for your Ashford courses and is included as part of the
Microsoft Office Suite. You may create presentations using Apple Keynote; however, to ensure
compatibility, the files must be converted to Microsoft PowerPoint slides prior to submitting
them to your instructor. Discover how to make this conversion at http://www.redgiant.com
/docs/doc-on/presto/_assets/tips-convert.html.

Spreadsheet Software

Spreadsheets are a useful way to organize information. You can use spreadsheets to track your
class assignment due dates or to organize your ideas for a class project. Most spreadsheet
software includes graphing functions, so you can show numbers in a bar, line, or pie chart if
you wish. Spreadsheets can also be used to balance your personal checkbook and create and
monitor a family budget. Spreadsheets are widely used in the workplace in nearly every pro-
fession. For example, accountants use spreadsheets to prepare financial statements and plan
budgets, and financial planners use them to track investments and produce graphs that show
the rise and fall of stock prices over time. Salespeople also use spreadsheets to calculate the
relationship between sales and advertising dollars, and spreadsheets are important tools for
your college business and mathematics classes. The list of uses for spreadsheets is endless.

Microsoft Excel is required for your Ashford courses that use spreadsheets and is included as
part of the Microsoft Office Suite. You may create spreadsheets using Apple Numbers; how-
ever, to ensure compatibility, the files must be converted to Microsoft Excel prior to submit-
ting them to your instructor. A tutorial showing how to convert these files can be found at
http://www.maclife.com/article/howtos/how_import_and_export_excel_files_numbers.

Adobe Reader

Adobe Reader is a software program that allows you to view files created in a Portable Docu-
ment Format (PDF). PDF was created by the company Adobe in the early 1990s as a way for
computer users to share documents, even if they had computers that operated on different
platforms or operating systems. PDF documents are usually first created in a word processing
or graphics program, and then converted into a fixed-image format using a special software
program for this purpose. The fixed-image format means the document can be viewed by
anyone, but it cannot be edited except by using the special software to edit PDFs or converting
them back to their original text or graphic form.

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