What Type of Program Do I Use? Quiz

Answer: A word processor

A word processor lets you check that you have spelt everything correctly and will enable you to undertake formatting of text and adding in images. It is designed to allow the entry of text in a straightforward fashion.

Answer: Spreadsheet

Spreadsheet programs were originally designed to mimic the paper analysis sheets that were prevalent up to the early 1980s. A spreadsheet program allows you to enter a series of formulae and numbers into a series of cells allowing you to model a set of action.

Depending on the sophistication of your spreadsheet program, you can undertake quite detailed calculations on truly massive data-sets.

Answer: A database

A database is specifically designed to store seriously huge amounts of data and retrieve them with the minimum of delay.

Spreadsheets and word processors can be used for storing data but they don't make retrieving it particularly easy. Web browsers often display the results of data retrieved from databases.

Answer: An image editor

With an image editor, you can apply all sorts of special effects to an image and even create your own from scratch.

Some typical uses would be to remove things like 'red-eye' from photographs - where flash photography has made a person's pupils turn red!

Answer: A web browser

Web browsers are designed to display data from locations on the web in a form that is easily understood by humans.

Spreadsheets and word processors can take information from sites on the Internet and process it into some other form if required. Typically, an FTP client will be used to transfer files between computers over a network (FTP = File Transfer Protocol).

Answer: An anti-virus program

Many and varied are the threats to the integrity of the data on a computer these days, especially if you are playing around on the Internet! Use an anti-virus program to make sure you are as safe as possible - just remember to keep it up-to-date!

Answer: A video playing application

A video playing application mimics a hardware DVD player and does all the hard work of decoding and displaying the image on screen.

With the increasing availability of fast ADSL Internet links, on-line video services can be accessed by your web browser.

Answer: Presentation application

All the applications in the answer choices have some basic presentation-like options (depending on the actual application - most databases separate out displaying the data into other applications) but a presentation application is specifically designed to help the eager salesperson sell their product, or an accountant to show how well the organisation is getting along.

Answer: Code editor

Code editors can be as sophisticated as a full up visual design environment, where you can add components to the program and write the code to make them work, or as simple as a basic text editor, where you have to write out everything yourself.

Answer: Operating system

The operating system deals with all the vital tasks such as tying the various bits of hardware together and translating electrical signals to images and words we can understand. These applications lie at the heart of the computer and can be many hundreds of thousands of lines of code long in their own right.