4. General Purpose Software

A general purpose application, sometimes known as ‘off-the-shelf’ is the sort of software that you use at home and school.  Examples include word processors, spreadsheets, databases, desktop publishing packages, graphics packages etc.

This type of software tries to be a ‘jack-of-all-trades’.  It provides many features that the majority of users will want e.g. formatting text, creating charts, organising tables.  But it does try to be’ all things to all people’ and so there will be a vast number of features that you may never use e.g. statistical functions, mail merge.  This makes the storage size of these applications fairly large.

There are several good reasons for using general purpose software:

• It is relatively cheap
• It is easily available from most computer shops
• It will have been thoroughly tested so there won’t be any serious problems or bugs
• There will be lots of user support i.e. books, user guides, online help and discussion forums on the Internet