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MS-Windows allows you to run more than one application, and communicate between them on your own computer at any moment of time. DDE allows you to do this by setting up a conversation between the two applications. When you start to think about it, the benefits of this are obvious.
Each software package has been designed for some clear, specific purpose. Word-processors are designed to manipulate text, spreadsheets for number crunching and databases for handling large amounts of information. What happens if you want an application to retrieve numerical information from a database, perform some summary statistics on it, graph the results and print out a textual report based on the information revealed by the statistics and the graphs?
Without the use of some communication technology between these packages, the design of the software would defeat you. However, with the introduction of DDE, the light appeared at the end of the MIS tunnel. Okay, DDE can't write the report for you, but it certainly can move the data around to achieve the results you need!
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