Introduction to computers and a software package

Client: North West Thames Regional Health Authority

Audience: Accounts staff recently issued with their very first PC, back in the 1980's

Brief: Take the fear out of new office technology

SIMPLE SYMPHONY

Introduction

This is a very basic guide to introduce you to what your new computer can do, and to the program that came with it. The three manuals with the Symphony diskettes will, of course, give you all the details of the program, and some hints about what goes on inside your computer.

Because this is just an introduction, you won't find everything in here. But by the time you've worked your way through it, you'll have a good idea of what Symphony is all about. You won't, however, find anything here about setting up a computer to run Symphony, because that should have been done already.

If this is the first time you've ever met a computer, read the section entitled 'From Hardware to Software' - it'll give you a rough idea of what you're up against..

The yellow section at the back here is a list of commands. Don't go straight to those pages now - they won't make much sense until you've read the rest of this book first.

*
Symphony is made up of several separate sections, but at this stage, you'll only need to know about three of them:: the spreadsheet (just like the ones you create on paper); the word-processor; and the database (for creating and storing data like address labels). Rather than going through them all, we're just going to look at how to create and use computerised spreadsheets.

This is the best place to start, because most of the basics you'll learn here apply to all the other sections. Once you're familiar with the spreadsheet side of things, the rest will be easy to understand.

…

FROM HARDWARE TO SOFTWARE

Hardware

Welcome to the wonderful world of computing. There is nothing to fear. If it's any comfort, a computer is just a dumb machine. It will do exactly what you tell it to do - no less, and no more - and will sit there like the lump of metal and plastic it is … until to tell it to do something else. Or, in some cases, it will keep following the same instructions until somebody tells it to stop.

If you give it rubbish instructions, it will produce rubbish results. This is why people all over the world are making fortunes by selling programs that produce the desired results, so you don't have to sit there, scratch your head and wonder what you've done wrong.

It's made up of four sections: the screen (or monitor), the box underneath it that does all the work, the keyboard you use to tell it what to do and the printer.

If you prise open the cover of the box underneath the screen, (we don't recommend this), you'll see a circuit board covered with things that look like square black centipedes with silver legs stuck onto it. In colloquial computerese, these are called 'chips', and are the working guts of any computer, whether something the size of the one you're sitting in front of now, or something as large as the mainframe up at the computer centre.

There are three categories of chips: the controller, that tells all the other chips and bits inside and outside the computer what to do, how to do it and when; the central processor, the one that does all the calculations and spits out the results …

… and the memory chips. They just hold all the information that's been produced for or by the central processor until it decides what to do with it all.

And this is how it works:

A computer stores anything it's told in its memory. How it can understand what it's told is beyond the scope of this introduction, but think off/on, binary and hexadecimal if you really want to.

It does what you tell it to do - with what it remembers - in the central processing unit.

When it's finished doing what you told it to do - with what you've told it to remember - the computer stores the results back in its memory again.

From there, you can send a copy of anything or everything to a printer, a diskette, or even to another computer over the phone lines.

But note the word 'copy' - wherever you send it, the original data stays in the computer's memory until you tell it to clear out that data.

...

Software

When you turn on the computer, it needs a program to tell it:
What it has attached to it in the way of keyboards, monitors and printers
How it's going to read external data from diskettes
How it's going to operate its disk drives …
… and all sorts of other details that needn't concern us here.

This program is called the 'operating system' and lives on the hard disk drive (if there is one) and comes up automatically whenever the machine is switched on. If there isn't a hard disk drive, you have to load it from a floppy disk before anything starts to happen.

(Hint - if you can only see one diskette slot, you're one of the lucky people whose computer has a hard drive. So all you have to do is switch it on and wait.)

Next, the computer needs a program like Symphony to tell the operating system what to do.

END