Can you believe it? The past fourteen weeks just flew by. Time to wrap up and look back, all the way to that first chilly Tuesday in January.
Remember that the final written exam will be held on Tuesday, April 21, 2009 at 4:00pm in room A2712. The take-home portion of the exam is due before the written exam begins. Don’t put it off until the last moment — you never know when we might have another power failure.
For our optional topic, we’ll sharpen our search techniques and figure out what this thing called RSS really is. We’ll also take a tour of online applications that are starting to rival the features of Microsoft Word and Excel.
Most recent browser versions can act as RSS feed readers themselves, but the online services and downloadable software products are more capable. All of the following are free.
Combining Word and simple tables from Excel is a surprisingly powerful tool. Despite its name, mail merge is useful for more than just written correspondence and mailing labels, but we’ll start with that.
Scatter charts are used whenever the category axis values are numeric and continuous (that is, fractions are allowed).
Rather than dumbfound your audience with ream upon ream of figures, spellbind them with a glorious chromatic Excel chart that summarizes all of those fiddlesome numbers into a smiling pie-shaped graphic.
To Excel, dates are just numbers with fancy formatting applied. That means you can do math with dates. Now, adding two dates together doesn’t mean much, but subtracting one from another is useful.
Functions are pre-packaged formulas that can perform fairly complex calculations in our formulas.
If you find yourself reaching for the calculator while working with Excel, you’re doing it wrong.
A novel idea for computers: let them do the math.
Word’s built-in Heading styles are more than just pretty fonts, especially when you combine them with a numbering scheme, or by cross-referencing them with page numbers in a table of contents.
