Working with applications

- I wanted to take some time to hear from you and answer questions you might have on IT fundamentals or computer literacy. So that's why we put together these ask me anything episodes. My friend Erin is going to ask questions about stuff in this chapter from viewers like you. I also want to hear from you, as well. My email is at the end of the episode. Ask me anything! - So I often collaborate with coworkers on projects. Is there software that I can use where they can review, edit, and view the work with me? - Oh, absolutely. The biggest player in the office productivity world is Microsoft Office 365. Microsoft Office 365 has Word, Excel, PowerPoint. All of these things enable you to, as long as your coworker also has Office 365, and you're all using OneDrive, that you can share documents, collaborate, real-time edit and change stuff. - Awesome. - The other big player is Google Drive, and the apps in Google Drive like Google Docs and Google Sheets enable real-time collaboration on, all over the world. - [Erin] Awesome. - Yeah, it's pretty amazing software. - Great. What's the difference between Office 365 and Open Office? - Ooh, a nicely pointed question after the first one. Office 365 is, as I mentioned, Microsoft's flagship office productivity suite. It has things like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote. It's a incredibly powerful tool that you can do everything from doing your taxes to doing presentations to writing your next novel. - Great. - Open Office is also a very powerful office productivity suite. It has all the same tools that you find in Microsoft Office. Open Office is different, though, because it's open source. That means a bunch of programmers got together and just for the love of programming created this office suite and then gave it away. - Wow, how nice of them. - Yeah. You can download it, install it on your home computer, and work just fine without paying anybody anything. - [Erin] Oh, wow. - So the difference, right, one of the, a big difference here, right? Open source versus Microsoft Office 365 is Office 365 is commercial software, which means, commercial means that the developers enable you, you can pay them, download and use their software, but you can't make any changes to their software. - Okay. - Right? They reserve the right to what's called the source code, the stuff that makes Word Word, right? - Okay. - Microsoft retains all of that control over that stuff. Open source, on the other hand, is usually licensed so that anybody can download, right, modify the software itself, not just make documents with it. - Whoa. - But actually modify the software. And the usual license is that you then have to make any changes that you've made to that program available for the entire rest of the world to download, too. - [Erin] Whoa, nice. - It's a very interesting software distribution model. - Yeah. - Now, keep in mind that commercial means it costs money. Open source does not mean free. - Okay. - Okay? Many of the open source licenses are free for non-commercial use. So if, for example, you have an open source piece of software and want to use it in your place of work, you'll need to pay the developers some money. - Makes sense. - Yeah. But it's still, it's a great software distribution model. - Great, sounds interesting. Manuel in Akron, Ohio wants to know, "How do I know when to update my software?" - Oh, good question. Many applications will have a little check that comes up periodically, or sometimes just when you first open the program, where as long as you're connected to the internet, it'll go ping its manufacturer and say, "Am I the latest version?" - Yeah. - And if not, then you'll get a little prompt saying, "Hey, your software's out of date. "Do you want to update it?" - I know those. - Right, you know those, right? - Yeah. - Other programs are going to be a little more manual in the process, but there's usually some sort of, in the menus along the top, there'll be something like about this software, and you'll be able to prompt a go to the manufacturer and tell me if this is the latest version so I can update if I need to. - That's easy enough. - Right? - I can handle that. - So that brings the real question up is why do you want to update your software? - Yeah. - Right? So software gets updated for a couple of reasons. The biggest one are bug fixes. Software developers test their stuff rigorously before they sell it, obviously, but there's nothing like putting your software out there and having millions of people also be playing with it, because they find, humans are amazing. They find every little thing that doesn't quite work perfectly. - I'm sure. - And so manufacturers will go, "Oh, that's a fix that needs to get changed," and they'll push out a new version. - I see. - Or a patch of their software. The other reason, and you'll get this with multimedia software, is multimedia files can be huge, right? And the developers for multimedia formats are constantly looking for ways to make those beautiful pictures and sound and motion into still beautiful but much smaller packages. - Right. - Right? And so they will come out with new formats for their multimedia files. Multimedia software then need to be updated to take advantage of the new format. - I see. - So-- - Well, thank them for that. - Yeah. So bug fixes and product updates. - I see, I see. Kelly from Fort Wayne, Indiana asks, "When I buy a product online, "I don't get a CD. "What do I need to install the software?" - Yeah, in the bad old days of computing, like, a couple years ago, we used to get our software from the computer store. - [Erin] Yeah. - And it would come with a CD or a DVD, and you'd put it in the optical drive and install away. These days, because the internet connection is so fast, manufacturers can skip that whole step and just make their stuff available as electronic downloads. So the usual process is you'll buy a piece of software, say, from Amazon or Newegg, and you'll click the link to download that software. In the process of doing this, you'll have some sort of registration with the company, and you'll get in your email the license for that software. And so you just go to your download folder, double-click the file you downloaded, and one of the very first prompts that'll come up is, you know, do you have a license? And you type in what you got in your email and then follow the prompts. - [Erin] Oh, easy enough. - Easy as that. - Thank you. - Thank you, Erin, and thank you. Ask me anything. (mid-tempo music)