Essential study software

During your bachelor and master degrees you will have a lot of different subjects with entirely different content. Throughout all of these subjects there are a few essential software you need to be able to use to get the best results in these subjects. Today we will be discussing this software and outlining why they’re important to get a grasp of!

Microsoft office

The Microsoft office programs are very important throughout your studies, because they are the basics that you need to be able to do assignments and presentations. Word is mostly used for text assignments and essays, powerpoint for presentations or assignments which you need to hand in in the form of a presentation and excel is used a lot for assignments  Below each program will be elaborated on further.

Word

Word is the single most essential study software in your studies. Word allows you to write down everything you need to write down during lectures, take notes, do assignments and write essays. Word is very simplistic in its design and is very easy to learn, as most people will already have experience with working in word from their previous education. An alternative to word is Google Docs, which has the advantage of having all your work being saved online while being functionally the same as Word.

Powerpoint

Powerpoint is also very essential to your studies due to the amount of presentations and assignments that require you to make use of it. It is a very easy tool to use to make your presentations look good and stand out among the rest. This is also a program that you have probably used earlier and will continue to use a lot. On the surface powerpoint is also very simple, but with the right knowledge and practice you can hone your presentation creation skills and make them really stand out! The online variant of Powerpoint is google presentations, which is also essentially the same but saves your presentations in an online cloud so that you can access them anywhere, anytime.

Excel

The last essential microsoft program would be Excel, which is important for a lot of mathematical and numerical subjects. Excel lets you do assignments which require numerical or mathematical calculations and lay these out on a spreadsheet. Excel is probably the hardest to learn out of these three, as it has a certain amount of complexity in learning the formulas required for each situation and it has a lot of functions which may not seem as straightforward to new users. It also requires mathematical knowledge to use well, so that is an added layer of difficulty. The online version is Google spreadsheets, which is again the same but saves your spreadsheets online.

Rstudio and R

Another very important software that you need to know about and use is R(studio). R is essentially a coding language that allows you to analyze data sets and scourge through them to get the relevant data out of them. You can also use this program for statistical analyses which you will need for a handful of subjects (including statistics, ofcourse). Rstudio is also very important for quantitative research where you will be conducting surveys and will have to analyze the results of these surveys with Rstudio.

Qualtrics survey software

The last software that you will use a lot in your study is qualtrics, as there are several quantitative research subjects where you will be using this to conduct surveys (which you can later analyze with Rstudio). It can be a bit hard to grasp at first but eventually you’ll be able to create great surveys with it!

These are the most important studying software you will be using throughout your studies. There are a few others you will use once or twice, but the essentials are listed above. Becoming familiar with these will help you a great deal in your studies!