Lecture two gave an overview of common PC tasks which are handled by the various applications. I realised that is important to know which application handles which task the best and how to use those applications.
File management is handled by Windows Explorer and the intricacies of directory structure, ZIP technologies and file compression, naming conventions and the windows commands will be handled later in the course.
Word processing is handled by Microsoft Word and we practised formatting and styles, document mapping, and templates in workshop 2. Creating spreadsheets is handled by Microsoft Excel. We practised using rows and columns, data types, formulae and functions, and graphs and charts in workshop two.
Creating presentations is covered by Microsoft PowerPoint and formatting and styles, use of animations and features, graphics, and notes view will all be covered in week 3.
Windows Media Player, Win amp, and Real player are the applications used for listening and watching audio and video material. MS Photo editor, MS Paint, and Adobe Photo Shop are used for viewing and editing graphic files. We learnt about these applications briefly but they are probably more applicable for those students who are going into a media qualification.
Workshop two proved to be a very useful tool in revising word and excel applications with which I was already familiar and also in learning new tasks and functions. Clearly only the basic functions that would be applicable to us as University students were covered and I am sure we have a lot more to discover, but, I found that I became more confident in trying to work out how to do get the programs to perform specific tasks. Over and above this, was the bonus of having to capture and paste several screenshots - I found the repetition of the task good as it seemed to make it all much clearer and more logical what I was doing - from creating the screenshot, to editing it, to saving it as a JPG file, to uploading it into Image shack and finally pasting it into the Blog.
Microsoft Word Exercise
Microsoft Excel Exercise 1
Microsoft Excel Exercise 2
Microsoft Excel Exercise 3
SUMMARY OF "USING WORD FOR APA TASKS"
I printed out this reading as I could see that I would refer to it all the time while doing the tutorial and found it easier to have it next to me rather than on the screen. It will be very useful for future assignments at university too. A lot of the instructions were for things that I have already done, but this was showing me the correct ( and usually quicker way) to do it.
It began with some general typing tips such as backspace and delete, dashes and hyphens, highlighting text, deleting a hyperlink, undoing and centering. It then showed me how to set a typeface (two different ways) and how to set the margins and alignment.
Other things that it covered were how to alphabetize a reference list, how to make sure that headings stay with the text, how and when to do different indents, how to set up page headers and footers, how to get the correct line spacing, how to customise auto- formatting, how to correct irregular spacing between paragraphs, how to do dot leaders for a contents table, how to customise the toolbar and how to use document comments. It also showed how to do spelling and grammar checks but included a word of caution to do your own check too - don't just change something because the computer says that it is wrong.
SUMMARY OF "GRAPHIC FILE FORMATS"
This article gave an introduction to the different graphic file formats.
Bitmap (.bmp) is the standard image format and 4-bit and 8-bit images can be compressed without losing quality. This is a good format to use for "wallpaper". Compuserve (.gif) formats are good for compressing to minimise file transfer time over phone lines and as a result is frequently used on the World Wide Web. Joint Photographic Experts group (.jpg) is good for images on the Internet. They retain their colour and can be compressed by different amounts. (This is good for sending lots of kids photos to the Nana that lives far away!) The higher the compression, the quicker the image will transfer, but more image quality is lost. The Tagged-Image File Format (.tiff) is used between computer platforms and applications as it can be read by Macintosh and Windows computers. Images can be compressed without losing any detail and is therefore the format to use for professional printing. Lastly, PhotoShop Document (.psd) is used for layered image formats that have more than one layer of visual data eg a picture superimposed with text.
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