Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Day 14

Today we will work on Excel formulas using arithmetic in a computer-scientific fashion.

First I will demonstrate some simple arithmetic operations and the way that we put them in Excel.

Our second task for today appears on page EX 132, with instructions on page 133.

The third one begins on page 142. We will use the third one for Project Three, due at the end of next week.

Here are data for today's work. You do not need to type all the words and numbers! Use Page menu/ Save As to copy this page to your desktop, and cut and paste from it.

There's a lot of interesting stuff about importing data in the book, beginning on page EX 120. Please look into that if you have finished the work in class faster than other students.

Monday, February 26, 2007

Day Thirteen

Ms Fitton has been stuck in the Midwest and today's class is canceled. See you Wednesday!

Friday, February 23, 2007

Help today

I will be in the lab (AA 156) between 12:30 and 1:30 pm today.

Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Day eleven: beginning Excel

We will work on Project 1 of page EX 58 in the textbook. (Hope you brought it.) Here are the data to cut and paste:


134204.50
117436.25
128526.50
150567.35

119444.50
119657.43
143582.40
221734.00

129975.43
127634.90
167340.75
231982.75

189456.23
129087.50
148965.25
193141.00

Saturday, February 17, 2007

Monday, February 12, 2007

Project Two: a famous web page

Our second project is, of course, a web page. Here are two suggested topics:

1. a Web bibliography on a topic of your choice

2. a Web biography, all about you (fiction and fantasy are OK!)

Requirements: First, you must have a coherent narrative. This means a story that flows, from beginning to middle to end. At the campus Writing Clinic on the third floor, you can find people who will read with you to help you improve your work.

And web-wise: your page must include at least ten links and ten pictures. We're talking good links, not just the first ten you happen to find!

The pictures can either be links to other websites, beginning with http://, or they can be pictures that you have copied and uploaded to your own NVCC webspace. In the latter case, it is not necessary to give the entire URL; a path from your directory will suffice. We will practice this in class.

How to submit: Send me an e-mail with the URL of your magnum opus. You must have it on your NVCC webspace.

When to submit: Due date is Friday, February 23, 2007.
Samples will appear here by the end of this week.

Day nine: work on web pages, create PDFs

We will soon finish working on our first web pages.

Among many protocols and formats intended to make it easy for machines of different types to work with each other is the format PDF. This stands for Portable Document Format. It's a translation of your work from, for example, Microsoft Word, into codes that can be interpreted by any machine with a PDF reader.

To read PDF files, you need a PDF reader, such as Adobe Acrobat Reader. To write them, you need Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Distiller (both $$$) or a program such as PDF995 or PrimoPDF.

To create your PDF file, go to the File/ Print menu on your Windows machine. (Not just Ctrl-P for Print.) From the Printer drop-down, choose a PDF writer. Check the filename of your creation, then upload using FTP.

Wednesday, February 07, 2007

Day eight: download and install FTP Express

Downloading and installing new software is not only an essential skill, it's also one of the most fun things to do.

Two reliable sites (among many others) for clean software and lots of it are download.com and tucows.com.

After trying out software, you will want to un-install some of it. On a Windows machine, that's done via Start button > Control Panel > Add or Remove Programs.

For uploading software, you use one of many programs implementing the FTP protocol, or File Transfer Protocol. Do a search on FTP to get an idea of how many there are...

For instructions for downloading and using FTP Express, click here.

Monday, February 05, 2007

Day seven: upload that webpage!

Today we will work with a program called WS_FTP for transferring files from the local machine to the Internet. This leads us to the "Hey, Mom!" stage of web-page writing, where we make our productions available to the world.

Here are two new files to serve as a base for copy-and-paste:

quickHtml.html and quickStyle.html.

You can save them to your Desktop (or better, a folder on the Desktop) and work with them there before uploading to the net.