Week 5: Clear

This week Microsoft Excel was introduced. We learned how Excel works, for what it can be useful and some of the numerous functions were illustrated. Although I have already worked with Excel during my study there were some functions explained which I have not known before. One of these was the function "right". With the help of this function you can tell Excel to copy parts of a cell to another cell. If e.g. one cell contains a first and a last name and you want work further only with the last name in another cell, you can use the function "right", indicate how many characters of the original cell you want to rewrite in the other cell, and, thus you can seperate first and last name from each other. The same also works with "left", this time only the left part of a cell is used. For indicating how many characters you want to copy, there is a further function called "find" which helps you identify the number of characters written until a certain symbol, like e.g. a comma.

I think this function is rather important, because in today's business environment it is all about digital information, which is compiled by one person and edited by another worker. Often the second person needs to focus on a different aspect of a particular document and thus needs to seperate data which may be written in one cell. Thus, with the help of these functions, you can align different data formats to let operations run smoothly.

Week 4: Clear

Among other things, this week we learned about the software lifecycle. First of all, there is a difference between patches, updates and upgrades. Until this week I have not been aware of the fact that these three have different characteristics. But this week it became clear that where a patch corrects bugs and mistakes of a software and performs only minor updates, an update goes a step further by adding new minor features to a software. An upgrade adds even major new features and functionality.

Furthermore, for using a particular software, people might need to be trained. This can happen with the help of different methods. There is e.g. the hands-on method, where people are trained in a practical way, in contrast to the in person, classroom-style. Additionally training can be delivered via the internet or community based, through forums, blogs and web pages.

Last but not least, we learned about different conversion strategies. There are mainly four of them, namely:
1) Parallel
2) Pilot
3) Phased
4) Direct (Cutover)
In the parallel method a new software is run parallel to the old, known one, which minimizes the risk of adopting the new software. By using the pilot strategy, there is firstly a small group using the new software before a whole company might addict to the new software. The phased strategy means that the new software is adopted step by step, whereas the direct/cutover strategy means that you adopt the new software all at once. In this last strategy the risk of failure is biggest, but of course, at the same time, this one is the fastest of all methods.

To further illustrate the differences between these three methods I included some pictures below.

Week 3: Clear

Another lecture dealt with the topic of system software vs. application software. Whereas system software is the collection of programs that are needed for a smooth functioning of a computer and its devices, application softwares are designed to accomplish a specific task. Consider e.g. you want to set up a word file with Microsoft Word. As you only want to perform a specific task (setting up a file) Microsoft Word can be considered as an application software. In contrast to that, Windows XP is a collection of different programs which act as a basis for certain application softwares and can thus be seen as a system software.

I the business environment a bunch of application softwares are used to perform particular tasks. Depending on your business you use different softwares to perform different tasks. These application software are all based on a system software, which in turn is based on specific hardware. If you want to find out more about application and system software you should check out wikipedia, which describes the respective features and characteristics very clearly.

Week 2: Clear

For week two we were required to watch several lectures, one of which dealt with the topic of ergonomics. As my sister studied ergonomics and I almost never keep the "correct" position when using a computer, I was very interested in the video shown at this lecture.The video gave a clear understanding of what ergonomics is about and why it is important for the business environment.

Ergonomics is about the design of jobs and equipment to fit workers. Further that means that your workplace should be designed so that well-being of the workers and productivity are optmized. Therefore you need to keep a certain position (see above or in the video) while using a computer, and keep often used things close. This is especially important for the business environment because nowadays there is hardly any business without computers and thus without workers using a computer.

If you want to find out more about this topic, there are several websites explaining the rationale of it in more detail then possible here (eg. wikipedia). All in all, ergonomics gets more and more important and one should at least have heard about it, when starting to work in the business environment.

Week 1: Muddy

Before starting the quiz of week 1, I watched the video "A fair(y) Use Tale" on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJn_jC4FNDo . For me as an exchange student from Germany, this video was really hard to understand. Instead of clear, short and descriptive sentences about copyright, several animated characters speak one word of a particular sentence, which makes the explanations very difficult to understand. This was really muddy and annoying.

Therefore I suggest, to learn about copyright and its implications it would be more helpful to have a look at either http://www.copyright.gov/ or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright. Of course these websites are not trying to be as "funny" as the video, but instead they are much more informative and clearer to understand. It may be that local students did not have any problems to get the content of the video, but as said above, for me as a non-native English speaker this was quite difficult.

Finally I would like to shortly explain what copyright is about. The term copyright describes a set of rights, exclusively granted to the creator of different kinds of work, e.g. music, films, songs, etc. . These rights include the right to copy, distribute and adapt the created work. Of course there is a lot more to learn about "copyright", its implications and the several details of the law. Therefore I suggest interested readers to have a look at the proposed websites to get informed without having to deal with muddy explanations.