Word Processing Software : The main use for word processing is found in secretarial offices and small publishing companies. However, if you are involved in generating your own correspondence, or you are lucky enough to have your own secretarial support, you might find word processing programs useful. They are useful if you need to generate a large number of standard items of correspondence with small adaptations. Since we are mainly concerned here with information and management we will not dwell on word processing programs further except for one point and that is the use of word processing files to hold data in records. You may recall that in the paragraph on databases, we spoke of the need to link 'details out of a database to a word processing program to enable mail merger to be carried out by a computer 'merging' two text files. One will be a letter, or address label layout; and the other will contain the variable details, e.g. the salutation, name and address and so on. If you are involved in carrying out mail mergers or circulars, it might well be worth your while maintaining a 'details' file of all the names and addresses of your correspondents. This file can be edited like any other text file.

Nowadays you can find integrated software which combines several of the capabilities of packages listed in earlier subsections. Microsoft Windows is the most popular such software.