Tutor profile: Alison Q.

I'm used to using Google Suite but my instructor requires use of Microsoft Suite. How do the Google apps map to the Microsoft apps?

If you use the standard Google Suite apps like Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Chat, and Meetings, you will find Microsoft apps that offer the same functionality. The cloud-based storage and sharing service similar to Google Drive is similar to One Drive and Sharepoint. One Drive is primarily for storing your documents in the cloud, and those documents are only shared when you give someone access to them. Sharepoint is set up as a team or organization-based cloud server, so any documents saved in Sharepoint is accessible to everyone. Docs is the equivalent of Word, Sheets is Excel, Slides is PowerPoint, and Gmail is Outlook. Microsoft Teams is similar to Google Chat/Meetings or Slack, allowing you to create groups, communicate and collaborate, share documents. For ongoing projects, it provides a trail of correspondence which is easier to follow than digging through emails, and keeps everything in one place. While you may be a little disoriented when you first switch over, you will find quickly that the functionality is very similar, and in some cases, you will find the MS apps to have more flexibility and options for customization.

How do I search and retrieve relevant articles from scholarly journals for a research paper?

Using your school library's website, enter the main subjects or topics of your paper, and limit results to scholarly or peer-reviewed journals. Based on the search results, you may want to further limit the results to only articles with full text available or to a certain time period. If you find that the results are not quite what you are looking for, try alternate search terms, using Boolean operators like AND, OR, NOT until you find a few articles that are close to what you were expecting. View the keywords and indexing terms on those articles to see if they provide search terms that are more applicable to your research needs. If your library website includes access to the ERIC database, you can input your search terms into the database thesaurus to find similar terms or better terms for your search. If you want to find scholarly articles using Google, use Google Scholar (scholar.google.com) rather than the main search engine. The same tips as using the library search engine apply, but you may not be able to access the full text for an article from Google. And, once you find an article or two that is useful for your research, be sure to check the reference list in the article for more useful articles. it is also helpful to check to see if researchers have cited the article you found in their research, and if the newer articles are also beneficial to your project. You can do this in your original search by clicking on "Related Articles" or "Cited By" options.

How has social media impacted and altered communication in business?

While originally designed to facilitate direct communication among friends, users discovered the ability to create and in some cases monetize content. Established businesses were no longer the gatekeepers of content, requiring business models to change, and reducing the power of businesses to decide what content is valuable and popular.