BS1009

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Computer Applications for Business BS 1904
Week 3 More Word Processing
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Business Application Packages

• Last Week
• Sources of Information
• Written Communications
• Getting it right
• Clear presentation
• Convincing your audience
• This week
• Organizing your files
• Digital Imaging
• Practical More Word Processing
• Styles, Layouts and Tables, Inserting into your
  document

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Organising Files

• The KAC environment gives you an M-drive
• Centrally-held space on RAID Redundant Array of
  Inexpensive Disks
• Accessible from every College desktop
• Be sure to back up your critical files to
  diskette
• Its up to you how to organise the m-drive
• Avoid the default (desktop) folder
• Try to store things in a relevant folderwith a
  memorable name
• Key requirement is to be able to find them again

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Navigating and Creating Folders

• By default, do all your work in Windows Explorer
• Press Start, Select Programs, and its near the
  bottom
• Better still, put a shortcut on your Desktop
• Start Explorer, and make sure its not
  full-screen
• Click on C\windows in the Left pane
• Find explorer.exe in the Right pane
• Using the R mouse button, drag the file on to the
  desktop
• When you release it, youll get chance to Create
  a shortcut
• In Explorer, its easy to create a new folder
• Click on the parent folder in the L pane
• Pull-down File, select New, then Folder
• Itll appear in the R pane, and you can overtype
  the name

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Finding Files

• Best way is to know where to look!
• Logical naming of folders is the key thing
• Possibly by subject area (course, project,
  private)
• And within the folders, sensible file names and
  types
• Explorer can help here too
• Use View menu to get detailed view, and Toolbar
• Use View then Options to stop hiding file-types
• Click on column headings of R pane to sort
  contents
• Descending date order is my favourite
• Puts active files at the top of the list
• And if all else fails, use Tools menu and Find
  Files
• Practical please find Notepad.exe on the C drive

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Digital Imaging

• Why use Images?
• Getting (and keeping) attention
• Improving communication
• What kind of images are there?
• Vector and Raster graphics
• How do we get them into the computer?
• Drawing them directly
• Cameras
• Scanners
• Practical
• Taking and editing pictures

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Why use Images?

• Getting (and keeping) attention
• Pictures can make direct appeal to emotions
• People remember information better if it comes
  through several senses
• Avoids distraction by audience reading the
  words
• Improving communication
• Complex ideas often expressed well by diagram
• Eye can take in much information at once
  compare looking at map with hearing directions
• Photo of Mount Fuji beats a verbal description

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What kind of images are there?

• Vector graphics
• What we do with a pen or brush pictures made
  up of lines and fill-in colouring
• Draw tool in Microsoft Office produces this
• Very efficient to store say where lines start
  and end
• Raster graphics
• What a TV does splits image up into lines of
  dots and displays colour of each dot in sequence
• So do computer screens, and most printers
• Photographs are a bit like raster graphics, but
  the dots arent in straight lines theyre tiny
  random grains of silver halide

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How do we capture images?

• Drawing them directly
• Draw tool creates vector graphics for you
• Traditional Film Cameras
• Use light to affect chemicals
• Grains are very fine billions of them in a
  slide
• Scanners
• Used to raster a slide or picture
• Resolution is always worse than the original
• Digital Cameras
• Cuts out the photographic stage
• Image shines directly on to electronic matrix

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Resolution

• Measured in pixels (picture elements), for
  example
• Computer screens are 640480, 800600 or 1024768
• Printers are 300 dots per inch, or 600, or more
• Resolution is a major determinant of quality
• A slanting line must appear as a series of little
  steps, but you dont want to be able to
  distinguish them
• Digital Cameras are usually measured like
  displays
• Scanners like printers 600 dpi is usual
• What matters is optical resolution (number of
  pixels)
• Many scanners imitate better resolution by
  interpolation
• Another factor is how many colours it can see

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RGB Adding Colours on a Display

• Colours on a screen are made by adding Red,
  Green and Blue light
• One gun to shoot electrons at each colour
  phosphor
• The eye puts them together

• Usually work with 256 levels of each colour
• Gives us 16 million shades

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Printing is different

• When you print, all you can do is to subtract a
  colour from the light thats falling on the paper
• Turquoise ink absorbs the red, reflects Green
  Blue
• Yellow absorbs Blue, reflects Red and Green
• So if you mix them, only the Green light is
  reflected
• We normally print with four colours of ink
• Turquoise (or Cyan in American)
• Magenta (Pink)
• Yellow
• Black (saves having to use all the others
  together)
• Makes it difficult to match colours on paper
  screen

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Whats in a Scanner?

• Scanner bounces a strip of white light off the
  picture
• Examines narrow line of reflected light in
  thousands of CCDs (electronic photo-detectors)
• Unit then moves on to look at next line
• Can scan once for each colour, or all at once

Lid to hold picture flat
Picture on glass plate
Carriage moves along on rail
lamp
detectors
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Practical Scanning

• Scanning usually involves two stages
• Pre-scan shows you everything on the plate
• Low-resolution, so fairly quick
• You select area of interest from display on the
  screen
• Then scans this area at full resolution quite
  slow
• File produced can be huge
• At 600 dpi, a 10 7 image is 60004200 dots
• At three bytes per dot, thats 75MB!
• Software usually lets you compress it

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Optical Character Recognition

• If the image you scanned is text, it would be
  nice to be able to code it for editing OCR does
  this
• Relies on limited number of characters
• English alphabet is moderately easy 70 shapes
• Even here error-rate is significant (2 10 per
  page)
• Works best with Arial and other sans-serif fonts
• Less good with accented languages (French, Czech)
• I expect its hopeless with Kanji!
• With a spelling-checker, it can be worth using
  OCR
• Even re-typing introduces some errors
• Main problem is when page layout is complex

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Using a Digital Camera

• Cuts out the scanning stage
• Image is focused directly on CCD array in camera
• Prices still high, but dropping fast
• Typical resolution is 1024 768 or better
  (megapixel)
• Image stored in camera
• Compressed immediately to save storage
• Usually in electronic memory (sometimes
  removable)
• Sony make one that stores to diskette
• Downloaded to computer

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More Word Processing

• Chapter 4 of Knight covers this topic (Ch.8 in
  1st Edition)
• Elementary but vital
• Traps for those who are used to a typewriter
• Undo Redo are best buttons on the toolbar (also
  Save)
• Styles
• Avoid changing format of individual paragraphs
• Instead, use a style that matches the text
  structuresuch as heading, list, quotation,
  example
• Columns
• Try using Format Column and see what happens
• Tables
• Often preferable to column format when columns
  related

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Obvious to Some

• A word-processor is not a typewriter
• The r key puts a paragraph mark character into
  your file, it doesnt just move the cursor
• Let the words spill to the next line
  automatically
• Only use r when you want to start a new paragraph
• Spaces and proportional fonts dont mix
• The space bar produces spaces about as wide as an
  n
• If you space across to get the cursor under a
  word,it wont quite be in the right place
• Need to set and use Tabs (preferably in the
  style)
• Explicit Page-breaks can be dangerous why?

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Revising Styles

• First thing is to get Normal right
• Has to be done with Format Style
• Modify Paragraph to get space in front of each
  paragraph
• and Font to get a reasonable size (e.g. 12 point
  Times)
• and Tabs to allow for
• indent (say 1.2 cm)
• text starting near the middle of the line
• Right tab at end of line to let you push
  something hard right
• Type then modify stuff you need to, such as
  headings
• Good idea to use a built-in style, and modify
  that
• Pull down style name, click on the name, then
  choose
• Or type your new style name into the style box

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Simple Layouts

• Styles will get most things right, for example
• Headings usually include the paragraph attribute
  keep with next
• this avoids Widowing a heading at the bottom of a
  page
• For multiple columns, think what the purpose is
• Logical pages on a sheet Use Format Columns
• Text will just flow from column to column
• Can look odd when L column has heading and R
  doesnt
• Related items, as on an agenda use tabs or a
  table
• Tabs are simple, but a pain if text doesnt fit
• Tables allow word wrapping within a cell

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Tables

• Easy to set up a table with columns of equal
  width
• Can then drag boundaries to get what you want
• But make sure you do it to the whole table
• Traps for the unwary
• You can merge cells to get complex effects, but
  with unexpected side-effects (column 2 is made up
  of all cells that are 2nd from right they need
  not be vertical stack)
• Best thing is to try it
• Note the internal margins around the words you
  type
• Do you need special styles for cell contents?
• What about column and row headings?

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Properties and the Insert Menu

• File Properties let you define file-wide
  attributes such as Author, Title, Subject
• These then act as Fields you can insert into
  the text
• Other Fields are automatically defined, for
  example
• Page number, document name (freddo.doc), date,
  time
• Particularly useful in footing text
• You can also insert Symbols
• Thats how I got things like t into this
  presentation
• Useful for mathematical symbols, Greek letters
  etc.
• and things like dashes (which are NOT hyphens)
• And automatic table of contents
• Based on headings (another reason to use styles)

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Questions ?