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www.office.com/setup Blogs: Evernote and OneNote are two of our favorite tools, but both have changed substantially since we last compared these two apps-in some ways, not for the best. Here's where these two stand today. www.office.com/setup LIFEHACKER FACEOFF: ONENOTE VS. EVERNOTE Now that Microsoft OneNote is free for Mac and Windows, the price and cross-platform barriers to…Read more WHAT'S NEW IN EVERNOTE In the last year, Evernote introduced a new pricing plan, redesigned its webapp, and added new features for its Android and iOS apps. THE FREE PLAN LOSES A FEATURE, BUT NOW THERE'S A MORE AFFORDABLE PAID PLAN Let's talk price first with Evernote, since it's the biggest change in the last year. The free plan no longer lets you email notes to Evernote, something most users enjoyed and used often prior to that change. Although you can get around this limitation with an IFTTT recipe, you won't get the full flexibility of Evernote's email-to-notes feature, such as specifying your destination notebook in the email subject line. So that's a bummer. On the positive side, however, Evernote introduced a new, more affordable paid plan called Evernote Plus. For $25 a year, you get offline notebooks for Evernote's mobile apps and the ability to lock the app on your phone with a PIN. Both of these used to require Evernote's Premium plan, which used to cost $45 a year. Finally, Evernote's Premium plan now costs $50 a year. But in return for those five extra bucks, you get larger upload limits: 10GB a month, instead of the previous 4GB data cap. With Evernote Premium, you can search attachments, scan business cards, view previous note versions, annotate PDFs, and use the new note presentation mode. EVERNOTE'S USER INTERFACE KEEPS EVOLVING www.office.com/setup Last year, Evernote took its redesigned, minimalist web client out of beta. Though slicker and easier on the eyes, the makeover also made the webapp less functional. You can't order

Remember the vintage game "Pull the Rug Out?" It is a board game where players stack different items on top of a rug. Eventually, one of the players tries to pull out the rug without tumbling the pieces stacked on top of it. Google's recent announcement that it is phasing out several additional services, including the highly popular Google Reader, reminded me of this game, as I recall that the stack most always toppled to the ground. Google introduced Google Reader, gradually built up its popularity, and then pulled the rug out with little warning, causing its customers to stumble. As one Google customer put it: "Google spends millions of wasted dollars on pet projects, then kills one of their best products on a whim." Google's most recent spring cleaning brings the total number of services it has discontinued to 70 in just a year-and-a-half. That's right-a whopping 70 services that have been shut down in just 18 months. Among the services Google will discontinue with little warning is Google Cloud Connect, introduced with a lot of fanfare just two years ago. Cloud Connect is a plug-in that enables Google users to share and edit Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel files. To continue collaborating with Microsoft Office, Google users have just four weeks to uninstall Cloud Connect and install Google Drive. Companies that can't get to it by April 30 will be out of luck, leaving them without a way to collaborate on Office documents used by millions of employees, partners, and customers. But of all the services Google is discontinuing this time, the one that's drawing the biggest backlash is Google Reader, a service used by hundreds of thousands of users to keep track of their favorite websites and blogs via RSS feeds. The news of Google Reader's shut down drew outrage from users, who put together a petition demanding that Google reinstate the service. "Our confidence in Google's other products - Gmail, YouTube, and yes, even Plus - requ

Remember the vintage game "Pull the Rug Out?" It is a board game where players stack different items on top of a rug. Eventually, one of the players tries to pull out the rug without tumbling the pieces stacked on top of it. Google's recent announcement that it is phasing out several additional services, including the highly popular Google Reader, reminded me of this game, as I recall that the stack most always toppled to the ground. Google introduced Google Reader, gradually built up its popularity, and then pulled the rug out with little warning, causing its customers to stumble. As one Google customer put it: "Google spends millions of wasted dollars on pet projects, then kills one of their best products on a whim." Google's most recent spring cleaning brings the total number of services it has discontinued to 70 in just a year-and-a-half. That's right-a whopping 70 services that have been shut down in just 18 months. Among the services Google will discontinue with little warning is Google Cloud Connect, introduced with a lot of fanfare just two years ago. Cloud Connect is a plug-in that enables Google users to share and edit Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel files. To continue collaborating with Microsoft Office, Google users have just four weeks to uninstall Cloud Connect and install Google Drive. Companies that can't get to it by April 30 will be out of luck, leaving them without a way to collaborate on Office documents used by millions of employees, partners, and customers. But of all the services Google is discontinuing this time, the one that's drawing the biggest backlash is Google Reader, a service used by hundreds of thousands of users to keep track of their favorite websites and blogs via RSS feeds. The news of Google Reader's shut down drew outrage from users, who put together a petition demanding that Google reinstate the service. "Our confidence in Google's other products - Gmail, YouTube, and yes, even Plus - req

www.office.com/setup Blogs: Having come around to the idea that it needed different versions of Office for different kind of users, Microsoft introduced lightweight versions of Word, Excel, Power Point and OneNote that are neither as pricey or as feature laden as the main versions included in Office. iPad users were the first to get their hands on this new take on Office. With Windows 10, the free Microsoft Office Mobile apps have arrived for some Windows users. 10 Things to Love About Windows 10 (7) - www.office.com/setup Blogs Read: Windows 10 Review - A Love Affair Here's how to get that free Microsoft Office in Windows 10, and what you need to know about it why it's possible for some to take advantage and not possible for others. HOW TO GET FREE MICROSOFT OFFICE IN WINDOWS 10: WHAT IS IT? Microsoft Office is wildly successful. Everyday millions of users all open it to get work done. Millions of documents are written in Microsoft Word. Millions of budgets and sales breakdowns are created in Microsoft Excel. Everyone has created a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation at some point in their life. Screenshot (236) - www.office.com/setup Blogs Windows and Microsoft Office are synonymous. Because the two are often used together and both made by Microsoft, many assume that one comes included with the other. That's never been true. Windows device makers often included shortcuts to trials for Microsoft Office with new PCs. Some even bundled it with their PCs, passing the cost on to buyers. Microsoft Office costs $149 if purchased outright or $6.99 a month through Microsoft's Office 365 subscription service. Office Mobile is what Microsoft collectively calls the free Microsoft Office apps that are now available. Word Mobile lets Windows 10 users view documents. Excel Mobile focuses on spreadsheets. PowerPoint Mobile lets users look at presentations. Outlook is separated into to apps, Outlook Calendar and Outlook Mail. Outlook Mail and Outlook Calendar are a

www.office.com/setup Blogs: Missing a key security signal could mean not catching a breach, but the number of security signals is increasing exponentially. It's becoming impossible to manually prioritize them. That's why Office 365 applies intelligence to help you proactively manage risk and ward off threats. Today, we're pleased to introduce several new capabilities in Office 365 that help you manage risk and stay ahead of threats: Office 365 Secure Score-A new security analytics tool that applies a score to Office 365 customers' current Office 365 security configuration. Office 365 Threat Intelligence Private Preview-Service that leverages billions of data points from the Microsoft Intelligent Security Graph to provide actionable insights to the global threat landscape and help customers stay ahead of cyber threats. Office 365 Threat Intelligence is now in private preview, with general availability planned for later this quarter. Office 365 Advanced Data Governance Preview-Applies machine learning to help customers find and retain the most important data to them while eliminating redundant, obsolete and trivial data that could cause risk if compromised. Office 365 Advanced Data Governance is now in preview, with general availability planned for later this quarter. KNOW YOUR OFFICE 365 SECURE SCORE Do you know how you'd be rated if someone were to evaluate your security configuration? To give you better visibility into your Office 365 security configuration and the security features available to you, we're pleased to introduce Secure Score-a new security analytics tool. Secure Score helps you understand your current Office 365 security configuration and shows you how implementing additional controls can further enhance your security and reduce risk.* Here's how it works: Secure Score Summary-Displays your Secure Score and provides access to view your Score Analyzer. Your Secure Score, the numerator, is the sum of the points associated wi

www.office.com/setup Blogs: Microsoft announced two new tools, Researcher and Editor, for Word 2016 today that introduce better research integration and writing assistance. Word 2016 is the newest version of the popular word editing software that is available to Office 365 users and customers who purchased a standalone copy of Office 2016. The update is available today to all Office 365 subscribers who are using Word 2016 on the Windows desktop according to Microsoft. The easiest way to find out whether you have it or not is to open Word 2016 on the Windows desktop and check whether the new "Researcher" option is available under References when you edit a document. RESEARCHER word 2016 researcher - www.office.com/setup Researcher is a new tool that you may use to find references directly from within Word 2016. The feature uses Bing's Knowledge Graph for that and displays data in a sidebar in the Word 2016 when enabled. You find the new option under References > Researcher. Researcher is a new service in Word that helps you find and incorporate reliable sources and content for your paper in fewer steps. Right within your Word document you can explore material related to your topic and add it-and its properly-formatted citation-in one click. Researcher uses the Bing Knowledge Graph to pull in the appropriate content from the web and provide structured, safe and credible information. You may use the new tool to add quotes and "properly formatted citation" to documents. While this may not be suitable for science-grade documents, it may do for many other types of documents. EDITOR word 2016 editor - www.office.com/setup Editor is touted as a new digital writing assistant that assists you with proofing and editing services. The initial release flags unclear phrases, redundancy or complex words, and makes recommendations by displaying alternatives to you. The service uses machine learning and natural language processing for that, and will improve over time

Yana Terukhova is a Product Marketing Manager on the Microsoft Visio team. Visually displaying always up-to-date information on clearly laid out diagrams helps to communicate information effectively. In this post, we will see how to connect data from external sources to a diagram. Linking data to Visio diagrams was first introduced in 2007 and has been overwhelmingly popular. We've improved the functionality since then and the capability has become increasingly more powerful. Associating data with shapes on a diagram does not require any code. There's a simple wizard which guides you through linking your data source to your diagram. Once you've linked data to diagram shapes, apply data graphics to shapes-text, data bars, icons, or color by value conditional formatting-to visually display numerical data. The important point here is that data-linked diagrams are dynamic; the data graphics change when data is refreshed in the source (like Excel).

Every couple weeks, we round up industry news and articles you might have missed. We hope you enjoy our latest selections. Microsoft: Office 365 Cloud Now $1 Billion Business. Office 365 is now a $1 billion business; one in every four enterprise customers now have cloud seats with Microsoft. Office 365 Review. Office 365 "is still the best productivity suite on the market." Its comprehensiveness and the ability to stream a full version of programs give it the edge over Google Apps. What's New in Lync Server 2013. The enhancements to Lync Server 2013 "make Lync 2013 easier and more intuitive to use compared with previous editions." Microsoft Introduces Two-Step Verification for Microsoft Accounts. Microsoft rolls out an optional two-factor authentication service to improve security across all of its accounts. Outlook.com to Support 32 New International Domains and Alias Sign In. Outlook.com will be updated to include support for 32 additional international domains, allowing users to select a mail address in their preferred region. New Microsoft Privacy Campaign Promotes Consumer Control. Microsoft launches privacy campaign that includes privacy education resources on its website and a quiz that consumers can take to find out their "privacy type" and learn how to manage privacy settings. Intel, Microsoft Top Clean Energy Ranking. Microsoft and Intel use the most clean energy to power their U.S. operations, according to a list developed by the EPA's Green Power Partnership.

When FHI 360 wanted to move to cloud-based business productivity services, the organization decided to implement a Microsoft cloud-based solution. We recently spoke to Douglas Wilkins, Director of IT Infrastructure at FHI 360, to learn how the company is benefiting: FHI360 logoQ: Please tell us about FHI 360. Douglas Wilkins: FHI 360 is a nonprofit human development organization dedicated to improving lives in lasting ways by advancing integrated, locally driven solutions. Our staff includes experts in health, education, nutrition, environment, economic development, civil society, gender equality, youth, research, technology, communication, and social marketing-creating a unique mix of capabilities to address today's interrelated development challenges. FHI 360 serves more than 60 countries and all US states and territories. Q: Why did you want to move to cloud-based services for messaging and collaboration? Wilkins: We had a diverse IT infrastructure. Employees in the US had different IT toolsets and Internet access than staff in countries like Mozambique. Subscribing employees to a single, cloud-based solution was the most expedient way to ensure that everyone had the same IT tools, to work efficiently regardless of location. Migrating our communication and collaboration technologies to the cloud reduced much of the time required by our IT staff to manage divergent IT infrastructures and connectivity options found around the world. Q: What criteria did you use to select Microsoft as your vendor for cloud-based business productivity services? Wilkins: We wanted a vendor that demonstrated a real interest in our mission and goals, and that offered online business productivity tools tailored for the enterprise space. The capabilities of the Microsoft Services Consulting team, and the work of Intellinet, the partner Microsoft introduced us to, provided us with that. We migrated our 4,300 staff members around the world from diverse platforms to a Microsoft Offi

This post is brought to you by Seayoung Rhee, Product Marketing Manager in the SharePoint Product Marketing Group. Reliable business intelligence and insight are key to a thriving business. Excel, SharePoint and Office 365 make business intelligence (BI) in the new Office more accessible to everyone across an organization as part of their everyday work. New and enhanced features in familiar tools such as Excel empower everyone in a business to easily explore, model, analyze, and visualize data from various sources. With SharePoint, users of all levels can collaboratively develop and share insights through dashboards and scorecards, and this experience continues seamlessly in the cloud with Office 365. For corporate environments, these features are further enhanced by SQL Server for higher levels of performance and scalability both on-premises and in the cloud with BI Azure. Ultimately with Microsoft BI, anyone in the organization can develop the insights that help drive new discoveries and make better, more informed decisions. EXPLORE YOUR DATA PowerPivot was a popular add-in to Excel 2010, allowing users to create large data models with hundreds of millions of rows in Excel. This feature is now natively embedded in Excel to reduce the hassle of downloads and installation. PowerPivot is also supported in SharePoint with SQL Server Analysis Services where the workbooks with PowerPivot models can be shared broadly across the organization. New features like Quick Explore aid users in navigating their data, and Quick Analysis provides previews of their charts, graphs, and scorecards. Users can: Combine and analyze large datasets with PowerPivot Summarize data and discover trends with Quick Explore Instantly preview charts and pivot tables with Quick Analysis www.office.com/setup VISUALIZE YOUR INSIGHTS Introduced with SQL Server 2012, Power View provided a canvas to create visual dashboards in SharePoint. Now this feature is embedded into Excel and SharePoint so

www.office.com/setup Blogs: Today marks the general availability of Office 2016 for Windows, a suite of desktop applications that together with new mobile and web apps pushes Microsoft's new vision for PC-based productivity. Office 2016 is available immediately to Office 365 subscribers, as well as to individuals who would prefer to buy the software in standalone form. "We see Office 2016 as being just as important as the first release of Office," Microsoft group program manager Shawn Villaron told me in a briefing last week. "In the early days, Office was about bringing really important tools together to empower the individual for personal productivity. That was the way people wanted to work at that time. And for 20 to 30 years, Office fit right in. Today, things are changing. More people collaborate on work as groups and teams, so Office 2016 represents the change from personal productivity to team productivity." And that, really, is Office 2016 in a nutshell. If you're a typical information worker, student, or other person in need of standard productivity tools, Office 2016 of course works fine and represents an obvious and stable evolution from the Office version you're currently using. But the real meat in this release-now and going forward, as Office will of course be updated regularly, like Windows 10-is the designed around this new way of working. Confusing matters somewhat, Office-not Office 2016, but Office generally-is all over the place now. In addition to the classic, full-featured desktop suites on both Windows and Mac, Microsoft has high-quality Office Online web apps, mobile apps for Android, iOS, and Windows/Windows phones-and Office 365-specific solutions that are often available as web apps but are sometimes just integrated into the desktop applications. This ain't your father's Office anymore. Office everywhere: Microsoft Office is available on virtually any device you care to use. - www.office.com/setup Office eve

www.office.com/setup Blogs: The shrouded veil of secrecy has been lifted from the latest edition of Microsoft Office. Excitement for Office 2016 is still lagging behind the Windows 10 enthusiasm camp, but following the July 29 release of Windows 10, attention will return to the world's most popular productivity suite.When Does Windows 10 Come Out, How Can You Get It & What Happens to the Technical Preview? When Does Windows 10 Come Out, How Can You Get It & What Happens to the Technical Preview?Windows 10 is coming soon. Still confused about how the upgrade will work and wondering about the timeline? We have some answers, although more questions remain.READ MORE Office 2016, like Windows 10, has been re-designed within a revised Microsoft ethos. Office 2016 has been built from the ground-up with mobile and cloud users in mind, slotting in with the ever expanding fleet of Microsoft productivity applications. Office is, in general, a different set of tools from days gone by. We aren't confined to the five-or-so core products, and we can expand the functionality of the Office ecosystem using a massive range of add-ins and templates. Office 2016 logo - www.office.com/setup I'm using VirtualBox to preview Office 2016. Microsoft strongly suggested uninstalling Office 2013, which isn't currently viable due to work commitments. Using a virtual machine, however is a great way to explore different Office products alongside each other, without having to uninstall your current suite. I've also had a look at Office 2016 on Windows 10 Build 10130. Verdict: good times.How To Use VirtualBox: User's Guide How To Use VirtualBox: User's GuideLearn to use VirtualBox. Get virtual computers up and running inside your computer, without having to buy any new hardware.READ MORE Anyway, enough of that. Let's look at Office 2016. NEW OVERVIEW Much akin to the extended and inclusive testing phase of Windows 10, the Office 2016 preview has now accumulated over 1 million users,

www.office.com/setup Blogs: Last summer we introduced Ink math assistant in OneNote-a digital tutor that gives you step-by-step instructions on how to solve your handwritten math problems. Today, we are excited to announce that Ink math assistant can draw graphs of your equations, all within OneNote for Windows 10. Now, when you write your math equations, the Ink math assistant quickly plots an interactive graph to help you visualize those difficult math concepts. You can zoom in and move the graph to observe intersection points or change values of parameters in your equations to better understand how each of them reflects on the graph. Finally, you can save a screenshot of the graph directly to your page to revisit it later. www.office.com/setup FIVE STEPS TO GRAPH AN EQUATION IN ONENOTE Begin by writing your equation. For example: y=x+3 or y=sin(x)+cos(2x). Next, use Lasso tool to select the equation and then, on the Draw tab, click the Math button. From the drop-down menu in Math pane, select the option to Graph in 2D. You can play with the interactive graph of your equation-use a single finger to move the graph position or two fingers to change the zoom level. Use + and - buttons to change the values of the parameters in your equation. Finally, click the Insert on Page button to add a screenshot of the graph to your page. Availability: Ink math assistant is available in OneNote for Windows 10, for Office 365 subscribers. As always, we would love to hear your feedback, so please make comments below or suggest and vote on future ideas on OneNote UserVoice page. For more information, check out our support page. Get OneNote: Mac | iOS | Android | Windows Help: Answers.Microsoft.com -Mina Spasic, program manager for the Math team TAGS OneNote School Updates Adopt Learn Education Windows

www.office.com/setup Blogs: With Google Drive, you can keep all your important files in one place, then open them with your choice of apps and devices. Building on this open approach, we recently made it possible to launch your favorite desktop applications directly from Google Drive. And today we're taking it a step further by bringing Google Drive to Microsoft Office. Using the new Google Drive plug-in, people using Office for Windows can now open their Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents stored in Drive, then save any changes back to Drive once they're done. www.office.com/setup Blogs If you're working on a document, spreadsheet or presentation that's on your computer, you can also save that file to Google Drive, directly from the Office apps. This is especially useful for sharing files with teams, or for accessing your files across devices. www.office.com/setup Blogs With this plug-in, you can use the apps you're already comfortable with, while benefitting from the security and convenience of Google Drive.

www.office.com/setup Blogs: Over the last month, the Office 365 team has continued to introduce new security features and capabilities. Here is a roundup of some key security and compliance news from the last month: Applying intelligence to security and compliance in Office 365-To stay ahead of the evolving threat landscape, companies need the ability to analyze and learn from that data to identify, intercept and respond to threats. Office 365 provides unmatched security intelligence to help customers protect, detect and respond to threats. Read about the new security and compliance capabilities of Office 365 that were announced at the Microsoft Ignite conference. Security engineering evolution in Office 2016 for Mac-Security is a critical component in all our products at Microsoft. To help you get a better idea of how we build security into Office 2016 for Mac, the engineering team discusses how we think about it from a development and testing perspective, including the latest updates. Get updates on Office 365 Security & Compliance Center-The Microsoft Office 365 Security & Compliance Center is the central place to view and manage your data. Find out how the experience is improved by centralized security controls, including the ability to view and manage security and compliance for your cloud services. Accelerate your eDiscovery analysis workflow with one click-Does your legal department often complain about how long it takes to run an analysis for eDiscovery investigations? We released two new features for Office 365 Advanced eDiscovery-Express Analysis and Export with analytics to Excel-to make it easier and faster for organizations to quickly find, analyze and review relevant information related to investigations, legal matters and regulatory requests. How can my organization achieve intelligent compliance with Office 365?-Organizations are facing significant data overload with the amount of electronic data not only exploding but also gettin

Productivity? Sweet www.office.com/setup Blogs: Office 2016 for Mac was a long time coming, but it brings plenty of new features and better feature parity with the Windows version than ever. Microsoft has done a lot to streamline the experience, with a customizable, collapsible Ribbon as well as cross-platform keyboard shortcuts, but with any major Office update, there's bound to be a learning curve. These tips for Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, and OneNote should come in handy, and if you're stumped about anything specific, let us know in the comments. Office 2016 is available for Office365 subscribers, with a wider release coming in September. Don't forget to save! This is probably our most important tip: Don't forget to save! When Apple introduced Auto Save and Versions into OS X, many Mac users started losing our ingrained habit of hitting Command-S often. Unfortunately, Office 2016 (except for OneNote-more on that in a bit) doesn't take advantage of Auto Save. So don't forget to save often. Versioning is also missing, but on the plus side, fans of Save As will find the command in its rightful place in the File menu. Store your files in OneDrive or SharePoint If you need access to your files from anywhere, Office 2016's built-in OneDrive & SharePoint integration makes cloud storage simple. To save to your OneDrive or SharePoint account, click the Online Locations button in the lower-left corner of a Save dialog box. Choose your existing account from the list, or click the Plus button to add another location. What's the difference? Glad you asked. OneDrive is a consumer product for cloud storage, like iCloud Drive. Aimed more at businesses, SharePoint acts like an intranet, letting teams share and collaborate on files. Office 2016 for Mac: Ribbon - www.office.com/setup See larger image Maximize your workspace The redesigned Ribbon in Office 2016 unifies the look and functionality across all platforms. It also takes up a lot of space, and c

www.office.com/setup Blogs: Last year, we released Microsoft Bookings to customers in the U.S. and Canada, introducing an easy way for small businesses to schedule and manage appointments with their customers. Today, we are pleased to announce that we're beginning to roll out the service to Office 365 Business Premium subscribers worldwide. Based on your feedback, we are bringing several new features to Bookings: Add your Office 365 calendar to Bookings-Connect your Office 365 calendar to Bookings, so that the times you are busy will automatically be blocked in your public Booking page. Add buffer time before and after your appointments-Do you need prep time before or after an appointment? Adding buffer time to a service automatically blocks that time in your Booking page too. Bookings apps for your iOS and Android phone-Now you can book an appointment, contact a customer or check a staff member's appointments while away from the office. Customize your Booking page-We added more color customization options, so you can better personalize your Booking page. These new capabilities will start showing up automatically in Bookings in the coming weeks. Let's take a detailed look at what's new. ADD YOUR OFFICE 365 CALENDAR TO BOOKINGS One of the top pieces of feedback we've heard is that you want to be able to add events from your Office 365 calendar to Bookings. So, we added integration between these calendars to help you avoid booking customer meetings during the time you've set aside for personal appointments, staff and partner meetings or other aspects of running your business. To add Office 365 calendars to Bookings, click the Staff tab on the left navigation panel. On the Staff details page, select the Events on Office 365 calendar affect availability checkbox. www.office.com/setup Add Office 365 calendar events to Bookings. Once you activate this option, the system automatically blocks busy times on the Bookings calendar and on the self-ser

WWW.OFFICE.COM/SETUP BLOGS: INTRODUCTION www.office.com/setup Blogs: Microsoft Access is a database creation and management program. To understand Access, you must first understand databases. In this lesson, you will learn about databases and how they are used. You will familiarize yourself with the differences between data management in Microsoft Access and Microsoft Excel. Finally, you will get a look ahead at the rest of the Access tutorial. Watch the video below to learn more about databases in Access. WHAT IS A DATABASE? A database is a collection of data that is stored in a computer system. Databases allow their users to enter, access, and analyze their data quickly and easily. They're such a useful tool that you see them all the time. Ever waited while a doctor's receptionist entered your personal information into a computer, or watched a store employee use a computer to see whether an item was in stock? If so, then you've seen a database in action. The easiest way to understand a database is to think of it as a collection of lists. Think about one of the databases we mentioned above: the database of patient information at a doctor's office. What lists are contained in a database like this? To start with, there's a list of patients' names. Then there's a list of past appointments, a list with medical history for each patient, a list of contact information, and so on. This is true of all databases, from the simplest to the most complex. For instance, if you like to bake you might decide to keep a database containing the types of cookies you know how to make and the friends you give these cookies to. This is one of the simplest databases imaginable. It contains two lists: a list of your friends, and a list of cookies. An illustration of two lists - www.office.com/setup However, if you were a professional baker, you would have many more lists to keep track of: a list of customers, a list of products sold, a list of prices, a list of orders, and so on.