Week 2

Lecture;
Today's lecture on Application skills was simply covering the common PC applications like; Filing, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Internet Explorer, Acrobat reader, Outlook and more. These are the more common PC tasks in the windows system, and i frequently use all of these so this was all very familiar to me. We did also go through some Browser statistics which did surprise me as i was unaware of the some of the applications in the list itself. Although as i thought, Internet Explorer was on the top of the list.

Readings;
The first reading, Using Microsoft Word for APA tasks, was clarifying the tasks from the Word doc activity. It covered how to do Headings and footers, typeface, line spacing, margins and alignment, alphabetizing, dot leaders for the contents and much more. The reading was highly significant in it's part to the completion of the activity.

The second reading, Graphic File formats briefly discussed the different types of file formats that an image can come in. Some include; Bitmap, CompuServ and JPEG. The differences between these file formats meant that images would range in size, quality and compatibility.

Tutorial;
I found this weeks tutorial activities with Microsoft Word and Excel in Vista very useful. Even though i have Vista on my home laptop i do not use Excel or Microsoft Word regularly so i wasn't aware of some of the new settings vista had applied to them. I new about the tabs and drop down menus and how they worked but only thoroughly on Internet Explorer, which is mainly all i use. Also some of the activities within Excel and Word that we had to perform were completely new to me, i was unaware that there were all these shortcuts to Word, like how to make the Contents dotting apply itself and the headings and numbering. I always used to do these manually. Also with Excel i was unaware of much more. Even when i had Windows XP i was not a frequent user of Excel so everything with the Excel activities was very new to me. I was really surprised with how little you physically have to do as i learnt that Excel does all the hard work for you, the mathematical details, numbering, headings, columns and more. I found Excel a very efficient and fast program.


Activities;