How is memory used in a computer system?

Memory is most computers that use the Von Neuman architecture is used to store program instructions and data. When any program or process is doing something inside a computer the computer used RAM (random access memory) to store awaiting tasks and data being used by the programs. This is seen on a PC as the programs that are currently open, for example Google Chrome or Microsoft Excel. When a user is interacting with a program and its doing things such as entering excel data, this is when the programs instructions are taken from memory and carried out by the CPU. The data that is part of an open document in an Excel spreadsheet is an example of data that would be stored in memory as it needs to be accessed and changed quickly to show on screen.