Week Two

Lecture Summary

This week's lecture highlighted the importance of needing certain skills and knowledge in order to handle the various Microsoft Office applications in the most efficient ways possible. Some require only general skills that apply to most applications, but to perform specific tasks within each of those, specific knowledge on them is obviously required. Within each application, there are certain tasks that are commonly used.

In Word, these tasks include:

- Formatting and styles
- Working with templates
- Inserting images, tables, etc. (and formatting them)

In MS Excel which is used for creating and editing spreadsheets, common tasks to learn are:

- Formatting and styles
- Column and row record keeping
- Data types
- Formulae and Functions (eg. sum, average)
- Keeping multiple records
- Graphs and charts (for representing records)

In both of these applications, it is always useful to learn and practise writing shortcuts.

The remainder of the lecture also skimmed through other comonly used Office applications such as MS PowerPoint, Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, Adobe Acrobat Reader, Windows Media Player, and various photo editing and viewing applications such as MS Paint and Adobe Photoshop. However, the main learning task areas of this week were how to use MS Word 2007 and MS Excel, hence that is what the following tutorial activities in this blog will show.

Tutorial Tasks

MS Word Activities

I made the following adjustments to the paragraphs in Word shown below. (Here is the given paragraph untouched)

Adjusted Typeface: Here, i adjusted the paragraph from a typeface of Century Gothic, size 11 in italics, to Times New Roman in size 12 without italics.

Margins and Alignment: Margins here were changed to a wide setting, and alignment of the text was justified (rather than aligned to the left as is the default).

Line Spacing: The line spacing was adjusted from 1.0 to 1.5, which makes the document slightly easier to read.

Header and footer added:

References Alphabetized: Using the 'Sort' button, the following refernces were alphabetized by clicking the option 'Ascending' (order). This was done after a hanging indent was created by going to 'Paragraph' and selecting 'Hanging' under the 'Indentation' section.

Table of Contents with Dot Leaders: Created simply by double clicking on a point in the tab bar and selecting the dots as a leader to the desired tab point.

MS Excel activities

Here is my completed table presenting the hours spent on daily activites weekly. The sums and averages were worked out automatically using the formulas provided by Excel.

And here are the graphs representing the average of hours spent on activities, and the hours spent on only social activities in a week.

Readings

Saving a Screen Capture as a JPEG.

Step one: Create a screen shot by pressing the Print Screen key on the keyboard when you have the desired page open on the screen.

Step Two: Open MS paint and click paste to put your screen capture onto paint so you can save it.

Step Three: Save the file as a JPEG. by clicking the down arrow for "Save as type" which is underneath the "File name" of the "Save As" window.

Graphic File Formats

This reading is a brief and basic outline of all the graphic file formats and shows us to recognise their extensions when we see them and know what each basically means.