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JIMINY SELF-HELP HANDBOOK 4

Office Suites
Word processors are the basic tool of most businesses today. In large office buildings, thousands of
employees use this type of software every day to write reports and generate documentation, among
other purposes. But this is not the only thing they use: often, in the business world, it is necessary to
make presentations (whether to present a new product, explain a project to a potential client, present
the balance sheet of the previous year...) as well as organizing spreadsheets to automatically manage
certain elements of a given business, such as expenses, suppliers, client portfolio, etc.

These functions usually come together in the so-called Office suites: sets of programs created to do a
useful work within an office. The best known, due to its great capacity and recognition, is Microsoft
Office, a paid suite that includes specialised programmes for these and other functions. However, there
are completely free alternatives to this suite, such as Open Office, Google Suite or Libreoffice.
For the purpose of this module, we will present Google Suite as our chosen free office suite, due to its
capability to work completely online and store your work and documents in the cloud, something that
is considered by most experts the future of computers. Please, notice that only a brief glimpse of the
functions and possibilities of this software is presented now, but further reading links and resources
will be available at its correspondent section in this document.
Starting with Google Docs, it is a free online word processor owned by Google that offers it for free
along with other programs for spreadsheets, presentations, etc in their Suite. As it is multiplatform,
we can use it both on the computer and on the tablet or smartphone. It is particularly suitable for
computers with little power because it is Google that does the most work running this software in the
cloud.
It is a very powerful tool, compatible with various types of files such as .doc, .docx, .txt, .rtf, .odt, etc.
so we can see (and convert) Microsoft Word files without any problem. Another added advantage is
that, being an online word processor, we can share the document with several people at once in real
time for revisions, modifications, etc. In order to freely use this software, we only need a Google
account.
We can check its user interface in the following screenshot:

Source: Valencia INNOHUB Database