Can you believe it? The past fourteen weeks just flew by. Time to wrap up and look back, all the way to that first balmy Thursday in September.
Remember that the final written exam will be held on Tuesday, December 15, 2009 at 4:00pm in room A2206. 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.
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.
Here’s a terrific diagram for deciding which type of chart you should use for your data. Click to see the full-size version, and also check out the links that go with it on the author’s site.
Word is happy to take care of tedious details like page and heading numbering. Putting those two together, and we can create a table of contents for our documents.
Word refers to anything that is not strictly in-line text as an “object.” We’ll be adding a few different types of object — images, tables, text boxes, and bits from other applications — to our documents.
Microsoft Word, like all word processors, has a feature called “styles”: a way to bundle together formatting characteristics for text, as well as behavioural rules (usually dealing with page breaks). Styles take a little work up-front to prepare, but the return on that investment is far, far less fiddling with formats later on.
Word processing takes all that we learned about editing before, and adds in formatting and something called automation.
A sample pie chart, as I tried to draw on the board the other day:
And now a column chart, from the site GraphJam:
This one makes more sense if you know the song “Should I Stay or Should I Go” by the Clash. (Although, now that I think about it, I think they got the columns backwards.)
Charting with Excel could almost be its own course. We’ll focus on the important bits, but also play around with the zillion or two options available.
A couple of small spreadsheet topics remain.
Although it will seem extremely strange at first, it is possible — and useful — to do arithmetic with dates.
