Page borders

A friend just asked me this question: "Any idea where I can find free downloadable Word page borders? Please. I'm trying to make some Christmas card competition certificates and what I've found is so awful and basic."

I have always really struggled with Word borders and don't think I've used one since 1998. This is mainly because printers tend not to print quite what you'd expect or something has been set to Letter not A4 and all that stuff from the old days. No doubt things are better now but I can't suggest anything officially Word.

However, two ideas spring to mind (in the absence, presumably of the excellent Serif products?) and they are:

(a) take slices from an image - could be literally anything big enough (ie landscape wider than 3300pixels and deeper than about 2500 pixels for good quality printing). You have your own photos or look for something on morguefile.com or sxc.hu (registration required for the latter but both free) or, I suppose, Google Images (but remember to change options to show only large images). You could find particular colours by using the brilliant Flickr tool on my webtools site - can't remember what it's called but something like Multicolr on this page where you just pick a colour and it finds pics with that shade in. The slices can then be placed on the border of the document as you please.

(b) er, can't remember what (b) was now, oh yes, I know, PowerPoint - you know PowerPoint isn't just for slides, don't you? And you can write letters in PowerPoint just like Word. All you have to do is change the Slide Set-up to A4 or whatever you want. Then design your page the easy way with the usual range of tools. You could easily create a cool background by covering the whole page with a shade, graphic or image even and then putting a white rectangle on top of that. Hey pisto, I mean presto, you've got a very smart-looking template. Add text boxes for whatever you need if others are to use it. In fact, if you put all the design gubbins on the master slide then the kids can't possibly mess up the page anyway.

Office 2007 - where's the menu for this or that?

With acknowledgements again to Steve (trust me I'm a) Dr North at Agora, Microsoft have published some guides to help you figure out where to find the various tools that we all know exactly where to find in older versions of Word, Excel etc but can spend ages trying to find in Office 2007.

You can either access them directly on the Microsoft site or download them from there and use them off-line.

Word
Excel
PowerPoint

Office 2007 Ultimate for £12.95

Now, as regular readers will know, I've been more than content with Office 97 for getting on for ten years. You get pretty familiar with software, for better or worse, when you've been wed to it for that long and I'm still finding things I didn't realise Word97 or Excel97 could do. It was such a huge relief too, after the hassles of teaching in a combination of Word6, 7 and 95. A mere £12.95, however, could get someone on a course with a .ac.uk e-mail address the full 2007 pack for a year or, probably the better deal, £39 for a full licence.

That's a remarkable figure. £39 vs £600 retail!

The offer's intended for students. The .ac.uk restriction will, unfortunately, exclude many and strikes me as a mistake as I know of many genuine students who are not provided with college e-mail accounts in these days of everyone having a perfectly adequate account of their own or using communication facilities within VLEs like moodle. Microsoft also state that the course should be at least 0.5 which I believe means requiring attendance, or study, for at least two and a half days a week during semesters or terms.

It's worth enrolling on something for that deal. Big Blue Brother reserves the right to check your entitlement and, for that sort of discount, I'm inclined the say that's reasonable enough.

Even if you can't figure a way to get eligible, do tell your students.

Here's the link to full details.

Look! I've got 43 slides in my presentation . . .

. . . and you wonder why people look bored before you've even started! I keep saying this but still find loads of people who really should know better starting off their presentations by opening PowerPoint and there, laid bare before us all, is this display of n slides (where n is usually a very large number!)

Even if you've got this cool show organised and even if the slides themselves have a nice design and combination of text and images that aren't distorted, your audience will be thinking about the other 42, 41, 40, 39 and doze off for a while.

Don't do this!! Put the show together and then save it as a PowerPoint show. It's dead easy. You then get a .pps file which you can stick on the desktop or wherever. Open that when you're ready and Zapp! The first slide appears, full screen, with no clue to the tedium to follow.

It's been that time of year again when everyone gets staff-developed. Yawn. I was amazed to see so little improvement in presenters' skills after all this time but there again, none of them had turned up to my sessions this year. Probably the worst offender was one PowerPoint slide that had a large but very fuzzy image of something to do with College. It was obviously an image nicked from Google images but looked as though they had just found the image and copied the small version and pasted it in. Next time - get the real, proper size image from the site, save it and add it to the slide. And do check the size. If you have to stretch it afterwards then you need a bigger, better quality image in the first place and, frankly, Google images isn't the place to get them anyway.

If people put a bit more effort into the slide preparation then what they've got to say would usually get listened to a lot more.

Why do you want to use PowerPoint?

Some notes on using PowerPoint are now available, with illustrations from an XP2003 version, probably the most used at the moment and with significant differences from the old 97 style notes. Of course now I'll start getting requests for 2007 which I haven't even seen myself yet. Anyway the complete set and some tasks will be released via the Studyzone wiki as an experiment. I'll also publish them on either a site or a blog too but, at 22 pages, that's not as easy as it sounds! here's the first page, though. The rest at this link.

• Presenting information as you might have done with OHTs in the old days
• Supporting a speech or lecture – bullet points reminding you of what to say
• Displaying images in a big way
• A slide show (literally)
• A simple way to create graphics

Getting started

• Plan what you want to put on the slides (which will be different to, and much less than, what you want to say!)Start, end and middle etc. Find the images you might need and save them somewhere. If you intend to use links to web sites, store them as Favourites or Bookmarks
• Use the defaults. Leave the fonts alone. Type where suggested. Ignore all the designs and groovy backgrounds (at least until the content is finished)
• Use supplied slide layouts. Don’t add your own text areas to a blank slide unless all your doing is a picture show.
• Use a Master slide for anything that needs to appear on every slide (like a corporate logo, name, date etc.

more

PowerPoint notes

With so much new stuff around these days it can be very easy to forget that sitting on most people's desktops is the excellent Microsoft PowerPoint. I've just been asked to run some sessions, some for people who've never used it before and some for those who would like to use some of the more advanced features. Of course, the people I'd really like to see are those who think they're good at presentations but aren't and those who just need to know how to speak in public! Anyway, watch this space as I'll be making the new notes available here soon.