CPSC100 Fall 2009

Term Review

Dave — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 16:27:32 +0000

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.

Term Review [PDF]

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.

Mail Merge

Dave — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 20:41:22 +0000

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.

Mail Merge, pp. 72-73.
Exercise: Mail Merge, p. 86.

Choosing a Good Chart

Dave — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 17:37:57 +0000

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 Numbering

Dave — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 18:30:55 +0000

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.

Heading and Page Numbering in Word, pp. 60-61.
Exercise: Outline and Page Numbering, pp. 80-81.

Word Objects

Dave — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 20:49:16 +0000

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.

Word Objects, pp. 58-59.
Exercise: Combining Text, Images, Tables, and Charts in Word, pp. 78-79. (reference)

Word Styles

Dave — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 23:46:33 +0000

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.

A Field Guide to Word’s Style Screens, pp. 56-57.
Exercise: Formatting with Styles, pp. 76-77. (reference)

Introduction to Word Processing

Dave — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:03:05 +0000

Word processing takes all that we learned about editing before, and adds in formatting and something called automation.

Introduction to Microsoft Word, pp. 53-55.

Fun with Charts

Dave — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 16:22:40 +0000

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.)

Spreadsheet Charts

Dave — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 17:17:39 +0000

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.

Charts, pp. 69-70.
The Can’t-Fail Guide to Creating Excel Charts, p. 71.
Exercise: Charting, p. 85.

Text File Import and Dates in Spreadsheets

Dave — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 21:21:57 +0000

A couple of small spreadsheet topics remain.

Text File Import, pp. 67-68.
Dates in Excel, p. 68.
Exercise: Date Calculations, p. 84.

Although it will seem extremely strange at first, it is possible — and useful — to do arithmetic with dates.