General Purpose Software

General Purpose Software

A general purpose application, sometimes known as ‘off-the-shelf’ is the short of software that we use at home and school. Examples include word processor, spreadsheet, desktop packages, graphics packages etc.

It provides many features that the majority of users will want Eg; formatting text, creating charts, organizing tables etc. There will be a vast number of features that we many never use Eg; statistical functions, mail merge etc. This will make the storage size of these applications fairly large.

There are several good reasons for using general purpose software:

Ø It is relatively cheap

Ø It is easily available from most computer shops

Ø It will have been thoroughly tested so there won’t be any serious problem or bugs.

Ø There will be lots of user support i.e. books, user guides, online help and discussion forums on the internet.