Microsoft Office
Last update: February 21, 2024 - Added Generative AI statement
Today’s high tech office environment calls for sophisticated solutions for analyzing and presenting business data. This unique event integrates database (Access), spreadsheet (Excel), presentation (PowerPoint), and word processing (Word) skills to create an end to end data management and presentation solution using the world's most widely used office productivity software suite.
Team Composition
Teams may be made up of 1-2 people.
Schedule
Thursday, April 4, 2024 7:00 - 11:00 PM
Skills and Resources
Successful teams will demonstrate creative thinking to solve business problems and an in depth knowledge of the MS Office suite. In each of the four applications, contestants should be able to:
Word :
- Format text/margins/pages.
- Insert and modify clip art.
- Integrate information from other MS Office applications into Word.
- Creatively write/edit documents.
Excel:
- Format Excel worksheets based on instructions.
- Create formulas, including nested formulas.
- Use the built-in functions of Excel.
- Use the security features of Excel to protect workbook/worksheet/selected information.
- Create/modify/format different types of charts.
- Organize an Excel workbook.
Power Point:
- Create and modify PowerPoint presentations.
- Use the basic rules of creating a PowerPoint presentation .
- Add animation and automate the presentation options in a PowerPoint presentation.
Access:
- Determine the proper design of a database and make decisions on how many tables must be used for the database to meet its minimum requirements and how those tables are related to one another.
- Import data into the database from either Excel or a text file.
- Create forms based on specifications provided during contest.
- Create queries that will return both static information and calculated values.
- Create reports that meet formatting specifications, data retrieval specifications, and calculated values.
Protocol
Teams will be given the problem statement at the beginning of the contest time. Time will be allowed to read the problem statement and ask any questions in a common session. Once the question & answer time has closed, no further questions will be answered. Each team will submit their solution for judging prior to the contest closing time, at which point no further submissions will be accepted.
Statement Regarding use of Generative AI
We—the USITCC Conference Committee and the Foundation for Information Technology Education (FITE)—recognize the impressive growth, application, and overall utility of AI in shortening the time to completion of projects both professionally and academically. The use of Generative has increased dramatically in recent years. Students, employees, and organizations are leveraging tools such as ChatGPT, Bard, DALL-E, Midjourney, and DeepMind to supplement their own skillsets and produce greater volumes of work.
With that said, we and our cooperative organizations jointly decided to prohibit/ban the use of Generative AI from the 2024 USITCC competition.
The competitions at USITCC are primarily focused on and tailored to the knowledge bases and skillsets of undergraduate students from 2 & 4-year schools. The purpose of these competitions is to gauge, test, and present appropriate challenges for this level of student understanding and the competitions also allow students to detect their own deficiencies and strengths. Students will need to possess a solid understanding of the fields they are competing in on their own merits to truly discover where their strengths and weaknesses lie, such that they may better develop themselves for the professional world in which they are seeking careers.
Therefore, usage of Generative AI to assist in the answering, production, and development of student submissions is prohibited from the competition overall. Violation of this ban may result in the forfeiture of the competitor in that competition. We reserve the right to examine competition related network traffic data during this event. Certain web domain access may be blocked as well.