Productivity software (sometimes called
personal productivity software or
office productivity software) is
application software dedicated to producing information, such as
documents,
presentations,
worksheets,
databases,
charts,
graphs, digital paintings, electronic music and digital video. Its names arose from the fact that it increases
productivity, especially of individual
office workers, from
typists to
knowledge workers, although its scope is now wider than that. Office suites, which brought
word processing,
spreadsheet, and
relational database programs to the
desktop in the 1980s, are the core example of productivity software. They revolutionized the office with the magnitude of the productivity increase they brought as compared with the pre-1980s office environments of typewriters, paper filing, and handwritten lists and ledgers. In the 2010s, productivity software has become even more
consumerized than it already was, as computing becomes ever more integrated into daily personal life.