A school social worker wants to present a chart showing percentages of students needing academic intervention and find a suitable software pair for analysis and presentation. Which combination is most appropriate?

• A. Microsoft Excel & Word
• B. Microsoft Excel & PowerPoint
• C. Microsoft Word & Access
• D. Microsoft Access & PowerPoint

Answer: (B)

The main idea is to both analyze the data and present it clearly to others. Microsoft Excel handles data analysis, calculation of percentages, and creation of charts that visualize how many students need academic intervention. PowerPoint is designed for presenting information to an audience, so you can put those Excel charts into slides, making your findings easy to share in meetings or with staff and families. This pair is efficient because you can compute and visualize the data in Excel and then deliver a polished presentation in PowerPoint, possibly linking the charts so updates in the data reflect automatically.

The other options aren’t as well suited for both analysis and presentation. Word focuses on text documents and isn’t ideal for creating or updating charts. Access is a database tool meant for managing larger data sets and running queries, which is powerful but adds complexity for simple charting and presentation. Pairing either of those with PowerPoint doesn’t provide the streamlined data analysis workflow and the straightforward chart-based presentation you get with Excel plus PowerPoint.