The Letter I: A Glossary of Technical Terms Used in the Home Office
The Letter I
Images: An image is a picture of any kind used on the computer or a website. Images could be digital photos, graphics, vector drawings, graphs, pie charts, or illustrations. Images can be created off the computer and then scanned in and saved in a computer format; most often, however, images are created either with a digital camera and then transferred to a computer or are created with computer software.
Image Editing Software: Any program designed to store, edit, and manipulate images is image editing software. Some are very basic and provide only simple tools, such as crop, resize, and save. Many other programs available will do everything from change the format or compress the image file to adjust lighting on digital photos or animate simple drawings.
Information: Any kind of data that communicates content that has meaning can be thought of as information. The internet is known as the “information highway” due to the vast amount of content available on and through it.
Insert: The INS key, or Insert key, changes the way your cursor acts toward the text on a word processing application. When Insert is activated, hitting the space bar will “eat” the character (or space) directly in front of the cursor rather than creating a new space.“Insert” is also an option on the toolbar in many word processing and database programs; it allows the user to place additional text, a text box, an image, or another object into the document that is being created or edited.
Internet: Basically, the Internet is a whole bunch of individual computers linked together in a network. The linking between computers allows them to communicate with each other and to exchange data and files. What we now experience as the Internet first began as a government research application, extended into educational (university-level) institutions, and then, in the late 1980’s, began to be a networking and information-exchange tool used by businesses, and later, by individuals.
Instant Messages: A means of communication via the Internet, instant message programs provide a small chat box, or window, that links two or more users and provides a text-based means of conversation. Instant messages are used for both personal applications (chatting with friends and family, internet dating) and for business communication between telecommuters or home office workers and their employers and/or clients.
Invoices: Invoices are records of transactions between a service or good provider and a customer or client. An invoice serves as both a bill and as a record of payment, and creating, sending, and tracking invoices is very important for the home office worker to keep up with expenses and payments.
