Adults and ICT Essay

Ajesh Mehta is a normal employee who works in a pharmaceutical warehouse. This basically means he puts the boxes filled with medicines in the right places and inputs the number of what they are and their details in Microsoft Excel on a computer that he has at his work. He then makes a report on that and gives it to his boss and the other staff members. He uses many technologies. I will list them below and explain how he uses some of those technologies and how it has affected his personal and working life. TECHNOLOGIES THAT AJESH MEHTA USE:   Mobile Phones   CD Rewriters   Personal Organiser Internet Laptop. Email   Digital T. V. Microsoft Excel He says these technologies are a main part of his life and without them he wouldn’t have been able to do his work and enjoy easily. Microsoft Excel Although Ajesh Mehta doesn’t use Microsoft Excel personally but he mainly uses Microsoft Excel for work to do his reports. He says that Excel helps him to put his reports in their correct places very easily. Excel is like a spreadsheet and it is already set up in boxes; and unlike word in which you have to make tables and set them up in the size you want, which takes quite a lot of time, excel has everything ready for you. Before he started to use Excel, he used to have a lot of problems in a lot of different things. For example he always had to use scientific calculator to do all his calculations. But now as excel can do that quickly, he does it very fast. It used to take him about an hour to do all the calculation out the whole amount of time that he took to do his report, but now it only probably takes about fifteen minutes, out of the whole time. As he used to use word, he also had to make lots of tables and set them up in proper sizes. It used to take him about four to five hours just to do a single report as he had to do all the other things to make it ready just so he can do his report. But now the tables are ready for them, which saves him a lot of time and he can do his report in about two hours now. In excel we can also change the size and the colour, and we can also change the font like in word. It can also help you do bar charts like other seawares but very quickly and with easy processes. So in short it has also got the facility to do what other softwares do and plus its own unique ability. Now that he has started using Microsoft Excel, he can do his work quicker and doesn’t have to waste time. Despite all these advantages of Microsoft Excel, there are also disadvantages to this software. For example, there are lots and lots of different facilities that cannot be used by most people. Many people don’t have much knowledge in maths so they do not know how to use those facilities and as you know, Microsoft Excel was especially made for mathematical calculations. It would be quite hard for the user because he/she won’t be able to do those calculations. Another one of the disadvantages is that he feels is that the whole of Microsoft Excel is set up in tables. Then you can only write a little amount in certain places. Although you can spread the cells/boxes, you cannot write like other softwares like Microsoft Word. Ajesh Mehta finds this very annoying as he can’t write paragraphs in Excel. But he can do this by making it suitable but he is unaware of that. Therefore he has to write those things in Word and then copy them into Excel which takes a lot of time. So basically, although he has saved himself a lot of time by using Excel, he still wastes his time on other things. Now that he can complete his work faster, he always feels like doing more and more work. That basically means there is always work present for him. CDs Rewriters CD Rewriters are softwares, which allow you to write CDs on your computers. If you have two CD drives then you put your original CD in you first drive and a blank CD in the second drive and follow the process and the CD will be copied. There can also be CD Rewriters for the computers that only have one CD drive. This type of CD Rewriters copy the original CD on your hard drive and the when you put the blank CD in the drive, it puts that information onto that CD. Ajesh Mehta uses this software very often. He normally puts all information that he need to share with the other staff, onto a CD and then makes copies of that CDs and gives them to his staff. He does this about three times a week. He says it is very useful. He also think it is better than photocopying them lots of time on paper and then giving them out because he thinks that most of the time, the paper is lost before it reaches the person it is meant to be given to. The paper can also be torn before it reaches or it can be tore while in use. But he thinks that if everyone has a copy of the CDs with him or her then he or she can just print it when they need it even in future. Also, it takes very long to print a lot of copies, as they don’t have a laser printer. He would also need a lot of ink to print them of. But if everyone has their own copies then they could print it from their own computers, whenever they want. They can also look at it when at home on their own computers if they want to. On more of his problems with using CD Rewriters is that his company uses a lot of money to buy lots of CDs just so they can give a copy of the work they need to give to the other members of the staff. Another problems he thinks is very important is that after copying a lot of copies of the original CD then the CD gets really scratched which then goes useless. His CD drive also get very used up after using it a lot and they have to change it about every year, which costs a lot of money as well. There can be other ways that he can do this. For example he can use a network so that every person in his staff can have access to that file whenever they want. He could also attach those files via Email and send them to their email addresses. Al this would save their company a lot of time and money. This technology has affected his working life a lot. It saves him time because he can just start copying and then sit and do his other work. Although by using this brilliant technology, he thinks their company wastes a lot of money on blank CDs. But he thinks that even though they use a lot of money on blank CDs, it is useful as it can be used any time in the future as well. But as I said before, email could be very useful to him. Personally he uses CD Rewriters in a very different manner and also in many different ways. Mostly he uses it to make audio CDs of new songs so he can listen to them in his car. He likes listening to new songs very much. He said that he makes new CDs about twice a month. But the disadvantage of this is that when a CD is copied and as it is not original, it gets scratched very easily. So I would suggest that he could just buy a CD with don’t get scratched or he could always listen to radio. As Ajesh Mehta is very fond of keeping his computer up to date and not let it go slow, he re-boots his computer about once every year. So to keep the work that he has saved on his computer, he puts all his work on a CD. For this he uses a CD Rewriter, which he says helps him out a lot as he cant lose his work as after you re-boot a computer you lose all the work on it. But another alternative choice could be that he gets a virus protector which wont let his computer go slow very easily and so he wont have to re-boot his computer once a year. This way he will save time, money and so he will only have to re-boot his computer about once every three years. This is how CD Rewriters have helped Ajesh Mehta quite a lot in his both, working and personal life although he could use other options. This technology hasn’t affected his working styles a lot. But this does help him to take his work home and anywhere else when he needs to. Email Ajesh Mehta has an email account in Yahoo and Hotmail. He has had these accounts for more than four years. Email allows him to do his work very quickly and he also stays in touch with his friends and family. He only uses email for one reason at his work. When he has finished his work, he has to email his boss to say him that the work that he set has been finished and that he is waiting for further instructions. His boss then emails him back and then he does his further work. The problem for him by using this technology is that if he sends an email, it sometimes doesn’t go as the server might be down or there can be many people on that specific website. So he has to wait quite a long time. Sometimes the problem happens that he boss is not online. Even though this hardly ever happens, but it does happen sometimes. He gets very annoyed with this. Sometimes the same thing happens to his boss as well. Only other alternative for this could be to use a Telephone. This would be quicker than email, so it would save him time and he won’t have to stop every time he finishes his work. Although it would cost him money, it would at least be quicker. Personally he uses email to be in touch with his friends and relative. Every once a week he mails his parents and brother to ask how they and their family are. He emails them and gets a reply the next day, which is quite faster than snail mail. Although he keeps in touch with them via email, I would say Telephone would be much better for them. He could call them and talk to them in seconds while for email he has to wait a day for them to reply and sometimes the emails don’t even get through. But the thing is that phoning those costs a lot of money, so even better than Telephone would be Messenger. This way he could chat to them, talk to them and even see them if he wants to. This technology has affected Ajesh Mehta’s life a lot. He says if these technologies won’t there, then he would have had to waste lots of money which he can’t afford and so he won’t have been able to talk to his parents and brother every week. This technology is a very important part of his life. This technology has also affected his working styles. By the help of this technology, he can now send his little work files through files because there is no real point of writing CDs when the files are very small and only he needs it. But the bad effect is that when he gets his work home, he feels like working at home so he doesn’t get any time to socialise. Also by working at home, he doesn’t get any help or equipment that he uses at work. So he wastes his time doing his office work at home and he still doesn’t finish his work how it is supposed to be finished.