If you are a Windows user, then you would probably know about Microsoft Office suite, which gives access to various tools, including MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. Here, in this article, we’ll discuss the “difference between MS Word and MS Excel.”
Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word are tools in the software productivity kit of Microsoft Office. These are also some of the world’s most commonly used applications, particularly in business apps.
Both MS Word and Excel are different in terms of usage. Besides, they are the most widely-used software in anyone’s routine life. However, let’s understand in detail the difference between MS Word and MS Excel.
Difference Between MS Word and MS Excel
Definition
Microsoft Word:
Microsoft Word is a word processing software designed to enable users to produce a series of documents that look close to how they appear on paper between various devices on a screen. It is a word-processing technology used for writing materials such as letters or essays that render text editing very useful, to provide an easily readable paper.
Microsoft Excel:
It’s a spreadsheet software tool in the Microsoft Office. It implies that it is used for constructing document tables, figures, and measurement formulas. To businesses and organizations, this works incredibly valuable to document costs and earnings, preparing expenditures, model details, and quickly presenting fiscal outcomes.
Usability
MS Word is used in private and technical documents, job and education records, and references for interviews, lectures, and classes for companies and individuals. On the other hand, Excel may be designed to gather data from various sources, such as feeds from stocks and to refine the data using formulae such as financial models periodically.
For text documentation such as emails, books, and scholarly records, MS Word is exhibited. Besides, the text used to explain a number’s context in Excel is typically the short fragment.
Excel will allow complicated equations in which modifying one number often affects other measured numbers. Excel contains an extensive collection of interactive calculations to support users to measure them.
A Word document is designed in such a way that the text moves automated from one paragraph to the next on specific file size. Excel can print, but the page breaks are not transparent, and since it can be spread horizontally or vertically over many pages. Moreover, page breaks cannot easily be handled.
An Excel file appears as rows and columns that stretch vertically and horizontally from the screen. Also, it allows for tables with only a few columns and rows to massive tables of thousands of columns and rows. On the other hand, Word supports tables; it is unable to accommodate a large excel or wide tables.
As Microsoft Word is page-oriented, features including footnotes and contents tables that are not important for a table are sponsored. Many web-based ideals, like the horizontal centring of a screen, in Word, are simple, but in Excel, it does not make sense.
Common Factors
Both MS Word and Excel applications can produce printable files, and so one can be used to some degree to replicate the other’s work. Tables may be embedded in a Word document, or entire pages can be placed into one Excel sheet. However, each of the applications has its strength to handle their tasks more conveniently.
Although both programs have different purposes, individuals who need them to build their documentation always fall together. You might expect to compose a letter, table, or even a year-end study that involves a mixture of the two according to the circumstances.
| Basis | MS Word | MS Excel |
| Application type | Word is a word processing application. | Excel is a spreadsheet application. |
| Uses | For writing letters, essays, resume, and many other word documents. | For creating tables of numeric data or analyzing bulk data. |
| Interrelation | Word pages can be embedded in Excel but to a limited extent. | Excel tables can also be included in Word but not for massive data. |
| Formatting | Word has more powerful formatting capabilities than Excel. | Excel lacks some of the advanced features of formatting. |
| Calculation | Word lacks this feature. | In Excel, custom equations and formulas can be used to measure the data. |
| Grammar check | Word detects and corrects grammatical errors in the document. | Excel does not possess any such features. |
| Database activities | Word does not allow maintaining database activities | Excel is more into maintaining database activities such as filtration of data. |
| Analytical-driven | Word helps in creating and drafting documents for end-users so it can be read without any analytical driven-approach. | Excel can be used to interpret and evaluate data. |
| Copy-pasting | Word does not provide advanced features for copy-pasting. | Excel gives more different ways to copy things than Word. |
Conclusion
The two applications in the Microsoft Office suite are Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word. Each has various abilities even though they’re designed to function together. Word is a text processor firstly, whereas Excel is primarily used for computational equations. The MS Word program utilizes text, images, icons, hyperlinks, items for the presentation of results, etc. Also, it does not provide any description of the data analysis that the excel does.
So, these were all the significant difference between MS Word and MS Excel. However, in the context of usability, both are different but can be used together as a duo based on circumstances.
