Microsoft's Word App

We've had Office 365 for ages and its web versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint (and, yes OneNote, if you insist) but it is only recently that Microsoft have promoted these. They now call them their Word app (and presumably Excel app etc.)

Google really have led the way in this respect with their Docs getting better and better and considerable integration of Drive in Chrome. Microsoft have done a lot to try to keep up, including an Excel Survey app which I have only just noticed! That may rival the very effective and useful Google Forms, I'll have to review that later.

I thought I would have a quick look to see just how close Microsoft had got to something that really does rival Google.

Accessing your SkyDrive is easy enough, and your folder f documents is displayed. There's a strange-looking symbol for PDF documents. I opened a new Word App document and pasted in some content from a document I had in G Drive. The images didn't come with the paste but the text layout was OK and there are a reasonable number of styles and formatting options in the familiar-ish ribbon.

I chose that particular document because I wanted to remove a footer from the front page which I couldn't do in Google Docs. Hmmm. In Microsoft's Word app you can't even add a footer, never mind what I was trying to do! So I am afraid that's as far as I went. It will need to be more advanced if it is to be a real challenge and not just a place where people who haven't got a Google account go to create simple documents.

Excel looks more powerful but I really can't at this time recommend a move away from Google Docs which are getting better every week.

Something that Microsoft do give you, though, that I spotted is a link to your folder. I suppose Google do provide a url you can copy but here is an embedded blue box! Absolutely no way to change the security for individual items but never mind. And they do warn you about that. So it's pretty useless but quite pretty.



You'll see items there from 7 years ago when I first started experimenting. Gosh, was it that long ago! You'll also see that I have done nothing since.

The necessity to use docx may annoy some who still like Office2003 and there is only Download as a Word document as an option. All a bit restrictive. But more familiar to many and a port in a storm, I guess.

Thanks For All The Fish. And Computers.

I've been thinking about all the things I do and have just updated my website, andrew-hill.net, to feature What I do and I realised just how lucky I am to be alive at this time and to have so many amazing tools just there, ready to use, so many people just there, ready to help. And it's all free. Well, apart from some electricity or phone rental, which isn't much. So I'd like to say thank you to everyone out there who makes all this possible.

My favourite author, Douglas Adams, was born in the same year as me. I share many of his interests and delights (although I never bought a Mac!) and I often think it was such a shame he didn't live to share in all this. I think he would have enjoyed it so much too.

Text design
I have always loved doing my own designs for leaflets, letterheads, posters and the like. That used to mean buying sheets of Letraset and carefully positioning each letter, rubbing over it with the end of a pencil or a stylus if I was being really careful, and hoping that the serifs would stick down properly and that I wouldn't run out of Rs or Ts. There were usually enough Es.

Now there are lots of lovely programmes that make this easy and, of course, there are web design tools too so that I can publish them and see them on screen.

ICT training
My first real experience of word processing was with golfball typewriters and then daisy wheel ones which did allow me to make mistakes and fix them without having to throw away too many sheets of company notepaper. The biggest leap was with a Digital Dual Display computer we bought for the office. It cost about £12000 and the printer was so noisy we bought a special box for it. Even that wasn't brilliant though and it finished up on the floor below where it could bother someone else! I often thought that was a bit unfair so let me say sorry now to Lyndsey, Katrina and Susan in particular, as well as thank you to Jeanne and Judy who had to go up and down stairs a lot to get whatever they'd printed.

We taught ourselves then, just as I have done since with all the programmes I've had to get used to since. From Locoscript to WordStar to Works to Word and 97 to 2010 and no doubt there'll be more to follow. I also started teaching others in the late 90s as people started buying computers either at work or for their children to use at home. I still have the Introduction to Access and Spreadsheet booklets I wrote and provided for the sessions as well as many more. That was a job that I just kind of fell into and have been doing in some form or another ever since.

Teaching
As well as ICT training, teaching other subjects has been made so much easier with places to store materials that students can access when they like. Having extra tasks on hand for those that complete the first ones, having examples I can share so that I don't have to try and explain or draw them on the board. Being able to find answers to questions within minutes as opposed to spending hours researching in books and magazines. All these internet tools have made that job something I could do and feel that I could contribute more to.

Working with pictures
I remember getting photos back from the chemist and being pleased with a few of them but seldom all of them! You could get enlargements but it was expensive and quite complicated. You had to try and indicate exactly which part you wanted enlarged and could seldom do much about the ones that weren't straight or with poor lighting. I so much wanted to do more with my photos and there was one school friend who understood developing and even had an enlarger and all the papers and chemicals at home but it looked difficult and I couldn't ask him to spend much time on my ideas.

Photocopiers were a great advance and I did quite a lot with them but the grainy and solely black and white images weren't really what I wanted. So when computers came along and I could actually scan my own pictures, crop them and do all sorts of editing I was in heaven! Then digital cameras arrived and, whilst the first one I had (free with some software and with something like a maximum of 320 pixels!) wasn't particularly great, the next one was and, in fact, had it not been stolen in 2004 I would probably still be using it now.

To be able to take as many pictures as you want and not worry about the cost is extraordinarily liberating and I can experiment and even when the results aren't quite right there are tools that can help fix them. More than anything, I think, this has been the most pleasurable development, even though it hasn't made me any money!

Writing
I have always written things, from articles to books and poems. I love writing. Whatever I did write, though, stayed virtually unseen in a pile of big books, little books and scarps of paper. I dreamed of publishing them but could never afford it. I did try printing a 450 page novel at one place where I was running some ICT courses. They had a super fast printer that did things like double-sided printing and could put two pages onto one. That enabled me to have an actual printed copy of the book and some spares to give to friends with page numbers that changed automatically if I made changes to the chapters too.

Previously, with an Amstrad PC and printer it took 1 minute to print a page and you had to remove that and insert a fresh sheet each time. I calculated that my 450 page book would take several days to print! (I did do it, though. Once.)

Now I have been able to publish my novels, with my own cover designs and jackets. I have poems on blogs and articles in a range of technical on-line journals. I'm not making any money from this but the feeling of holding your own hardback book after so many years is wonderful. To see my articles and poems on screen is good, too, and to be able to share them and hope others might enjoy them too is most satisfying.

I now write regularly for a range of TV shows and entertainment programme reviews. Again, it's mostly for fun but some of these are proving remarkably popular with lost of people seeming to read them so that makes it worthwhile too.

Whereas previously all I would have done is scribble away to myself and hope someone appreciates it when I'm gone or finds it of historical value of some sort, now I can get the kick of seeing people enjoy what I write shortly afterwards.

Numbers
I have played with numbers and been fascinated by maths since my school days. Now, with spreadsheets, I can produce all sorts of graphs and series and things and just play with formulae for hours if I ever have a few spare.

There are also great resources available on-line for those that wish to learn more. My children have enjoyed the Khan Academy courses and I have even tried to teach myself some python programming with Udacity recently.

Editor
Whilst I seldom spot my own mistakes very quickly, I do seem to be able to spot others' almost instantly and enjoy helping rephrase text as well as correcting spelling and grammar for people, especially where it's in an important document they're proposing to share with others. Word processors make this a simple task although I don't rely on their in-built checks! Even I will have trouble with some words, though, and to be able to look them up on-line and get a quick spelling idea saves me a lot of time. Word count, too, is a real time-saver!

Being able to compare students' texts to both other students' submissions and what might be published elsewhere is also an invaluable tool.

Business
I once had a client who wanted to develop a business and he provided me with new sets of figures almost every week. I spent days and nights setting up a sort of spreadsheet (although it wasn't called that in 1982) which would do all the calculations for monthly balances, cash flow etc. It was wonderful and meant that I could do more of that sort of interesting work more often. Now I can illustrate different scenarios and produce charts for this as well as nice sheets of numbers in a flash with software like Excel.

This led me into the world of helping new businesses assess feasibility of new developments and, of course, those that did proceed would need stationery, leaflets promotional material and logos, corporate identities and, more recently, web sites too. Great. Just my sort of work and I have had a wonderful time helping ideas become real and helping to make them look good too. The computer and all the software tools have made this possible whereas before I would probably never have got so involved.

Music
Then there is music. I love the sound of the Sixties as well as every decade since. As a teenager, I would have to try and record tracks with a microphone held up to the radio or TV speaker and hope no-one made any noise in the background. The tapes were fiddly and not brilliant quality but I was able to build a collection of favourites. Albums and singles were expensive for me. Yes, I bought quite a few but not nearly as many of the tracks that I would like to have done at the time.

Now, I have a really comprehensive collection of good quality music and can listen to what I want, when I want and almost wherever I want. It's crazy. There was even a track I thought I would never, ever find because it was something I heard for just a few weeks one summer. It never got into the charts but I sort of got hooked on it and never forgot it. A little while ago I discovered that all Radio London's Fab Forty Chart programmes were available on-line and, sure enough, there were a couple of weeks when that track was to be played. With a simple bit of recording software and some editing, I now have that track in my collection and can play it any time I want. That's all so cool.

In fact, everything I do is amazingly influenced by having software that is mostly free, on computers that are not expensive. I can compete with others for business. I can express my views on things and expect at least some people to see them. I can do so much that I love doing without spending a penny now that I have the essentials. I will never have time to do everything I'd like to.

The possibilities are now endless. But I shall enjoy every moment.

In no more than 255 words . . .

Many assignments still take the form of [yawn] essays and despite wondering at the start how on earth you'll ever type 2999 words it's not long before you're tearing your hair out and desperately trying to figure out how to get it down to the 3000 limit (or whatever the tutor has probably set in a totally arbitrary manner. "Oh, it's Thursday, let's make 'em do 5000")

You probably already know about the Word Count option on the Tools menu, but it would be much more useful to have a constantly updated word count displayed in the top of the document (or even in the header or footer) so that you can keep an eye on it. Word has a way to allow you to do this, but not many people know about it. To add a word count, you need to insert a field code as follows:

Place the cursor at the position in the document that you’d like to add the word count (e.g. at the beginning of the document, under the title).
Click Insert > Quick Parts > Field (Insert > Field prior to Word 2007)
Scroll down the list of available fields and choose NumWords. Click OK.
The word count will be inserted. To update the count after adding more text, right-click on it and choose Update Field.

No, that doesn't help actually write the essay I know, but gives you something to do while you're typing.

Another useful tip from the good people at Windows Secrets.

17 drafts and counting . . .

Some time ago a client gave me the nickname Merlin because he reckoned I could work magic on documents to turn tedious text into something professional that someone might actually want to read. It's quite an enjoyable pastime, especially when I can get paid for it too and I almost relish the prospect of getting some Arial bold underlined and italic text, usually justified and in too bigger font to weave a spell over.

A few days ago, 12 Word documents arrived for my attention - the idea being to merge them all into one. As it was something that would be getting a wide circulation and possibly forming the basis for some future regulations its content would be contentious and likely to be mulled over in great detail. I had a feeling it wasn't going to be the easiest of tasks. The first problem was an assortment of page orientation and margins. Setting one set of margins for the whole document was fine except for the landscape pages where tables now stretched off into the distance right and others now appeared to have text jumbled about. The author had carefully typed entries into cells in a table, including longer sentences being split into two or more cells. Why on earth they hadn't had the whole thing in one cell, or merged a few I have no idea. As if that wasn't enough of a problem, I was then faced with indents that weren't indents but three or four spaces. Now these probably looked lovely in a particular font at a particular size but they sure didn't work now!

Eventually things began to take shape but I still had lots more sections than I wanted. The trouble was, every time I deleted a section break I lost headers and footers and no amount of linking to previous seemed to work. Finally, just two sections, one for the front page and the rest in the other, headers behaving and footers too.

Sent this off. The client says he'd like a nice graduated colour background. Hmm. In Word? No. I don't think so. better use Serif Page Plus which does that sort of thing excellently. Unfortunately, I couldn't transfer the contents from Word into Serif. It kept going wrong at the tables and making a complete mess. Another idea: I'd make a PDF from Word 2007 and use Serif to add backgrounds then re-export as a PDF again. Well, it certainly looked nice. Unfortunately, there had been some typos and text changes to fix. That's when I learned what a complete mess Serif makes of text in tables on conversion to PDF. Admittedly the text was a bit odd with spaces, some cells merged, some not, but the collection of overlapping frames with bits of text here and there was a nightmare. Even some words appeared to be split. Then there were the lines. what had been continuous lines in Word were now hundreds, maybe thousands, of very tiny lines instead. Fine whilst they all stayed together but one slip of the mouse and all was lost. Adding just one character to a word resulted in everything moving in a most unpredictable manner too. I persevered and sort of managed to make the tables look OK but it took hours.

That would have been fine but then came the dots. I hadn't seen them on my screen but someone else asked about them and it seems that moving some lines around left 1 pixel dots here and there. I found a few and managed to delete them but most were on layers several below and proved impossible to get at without moving those odd frames out of the way. That was just impossible as they'd never fit into place again so I gave up on the Serif solution.

Back to Word, which I knew had a watermark option and by using a custom image I could get some sort of background in place. That was quite easy but the edge of the image was exactly on the same margin as the text so looked a bit grotty. I had an idea to indent all the text but that was far too big a job and would have meant narrower tables which would have messed up the words in cells again! I knew I should have sat down and retyped all those individual cell contents into one big one but too late to start that now.

Strangely, the client was quite happy with the background but I wasn't. How could I add a full width background to a Word document? Ah! I could use the watermark image but not as a watermark but as an image behind text. I tried one page and it worked. Great. Pasted another 64 in and, after a bit of lining-up it was looking as good as the Serif production. Better, actually, which is saying something for Word.

Another really nice thing about using Word was that I could get the client to correct their own typos, or amend something they changed their mind about! Such a relief! Unfortunately, they must have moved some of those images while they were fiddling so it came back looking a dog's breakfast again. That's when I discovered that if you add images to a document when viewing more than one page they are inclined to disappear without trace if you go slightly over one edge! No idea where they went but lost 6 or 7 that way.

Finally, by now at draft 15, the delight of just save as PDF in Word 2007 and I sent a nice-looking document to my client. Draft 16 was needed because my image had covered up the footer. I had made it transparent at the top to allow the header to show but had forgotten about the footer. But why doesn't setting the image as 'behind text' not go behind the header and footer? Silly. It should do.

This morning I gather that Devon needed to be Dorset. I was so tempted to say, well, just change it then. But I didn't. Luckily, the client agreed to dispense with the footer. The only solution to that would have been adding to the image - now that would be getting crazy!

Quite some spelling test for Merlin!

There are more than 2 fonts on your computer

Sometimes even the several hundred fonts that you'll have on your computer don't provide quite the one you want. There are lots that are almost the same too which can be quite annoying but I have never managed to pluck up the courage to delete them or, at least, stop them taking up space in the font list in programmes.

In fact, that reminds me of another question. In Excel, if you want to change the font for a header or footer you have this tiny box to scroll through. Typing an initial letter, which usually focuses in well in other places, doesn't seem to do much so you're left struggling from Arial to Verdana. I'm afraid that I dislike Arial. Helvetica's fine and I can see the point of that but Arial just never, ever looks right to me. A particular hate of mine is getting mail in Arial bold, size 12+. I could even cope with Times New Roman bold and italic for a while longer before running for cover as long as the sender didn't add underscore which, unfortunately, many do for good measure.

On the underscore front, there are precious few occasions now when that U button is needed. There isn't one in my menu as I type this blog. On the web it tends to mean this is a link (especially in that colour) so if a designer does go for the U button he's risking a lot of users' frustration in meaningless clicking. In documents, headers look good in a bold font of an appropriate size. I'd go further and say that you really shouldn't underline very big headings, and certainly not title page stuff. In Word or Word-like applications it is simple enough these days to add a whole line background too which is often far more appealing than the line. And don't even mention individual word underlining, please. The very thought makes me worry that I may even recall the shortcut for it if I linger any longer!

If you must have a line then use the whole line line thing which can look quite reasonable. It's in the Borders menu somewhere.

This post started with fonts and that's where I need to return if my sanity is to remain. Handwriting fonts can be great but there are few in that long list. Whilst Windows provides you with umpteen whacky fonts and a myriad Times clones it doesn't do much on the writing side, other than some very old fashioned scripty things that you'd only use to invite Grandma to a wedding. What you may well look for in vain are some fun but not over-the-top or excessively childish fonts. There are lots around and many are free.

Take a look at http://www.getfreefonts.info/ where you have pages and pages of the things.

To install a font in Windows, download it, unzip it if necessary then move the font file to the Windows | Fonts folder where it should install itself happily and be available next time you open applications.

OpenOffice 3

There's a beta version of this popular and free Office package now released for public testing. By this point most bugs have been sorted and it ought to function smoothly. From a quick glimpse this is a genuinely new version and offers a smart interface and plenty of features. Of course, two reasons alone make it worthwhile for many (other than being free!).

You can save as or open pdfs which Office 2007 will not. You can open Word2007 documents which WordXP will not (without a shove and a push from a converter you need to download).

Give OpenOffice 3 a try - and do feed back any things you'd like changed to the OpenOffice developers. Links to how to do that are available at the software download site.

http://download.openoffice.org/3.0beta

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.

Making simple charts in Word

Say data and charts and the word spreadsheet comes to mind. Microsoft Excel's what you'd normally use but the word Word shouldn't be ignored. Microsoft Word has a chart facility that actually uses most of its brother application's tools and even has its own formula feature for calculations.

The simplest way to use both the formulae and charts is to put your data in a table. With a bit of care about how you set it out, and make sure you don't leave any blank rows or columns, the steps below will guide you through the process for doing some column totals, sorting the data into a different order and displaying it as a bar chart.

1 Insert a table

2 Put some headings in top row

3 Enter your data (tip: use the tab key to move which will also add rows if necessary)

4 Add an extra row for totals

5 If it’s not already showing, get the Tables and Borders toolbar, View>Toolbars>Tables and Borders or click the Tables and Borders icon on the main menu bar.

6 Click in the cell where you want the numbers above totalled and then click on the Σ key on the T&B toolbar

7 Repeat as necessary for other columns (check that it looks about right!)

8 To sort data in A-Z or 1,2,3 order of the first column, highlight what you want to re-arrange, including all the columns but not the headings or totals

9 Press the AZ or ZA button on the T&B toolbar

10 To sort in order for another column, eg by Maths results, you need to use Table>Sort and choose what you want in the window that opens. Again, it’s usually necessary to highlight all the data you want sorted (as in the previous example)

11 To make a chart, highlight the data to be included in the chart. In this case that will include the headings this time but not the totals.

12 If there isn’t an Insert Chart icon on the toolbar, use Insert>Picture>Chart

13 The default chart is a 3D column chart which will often be what you want

14 Use the corner handle to drag it out as necessary. To move it down, click on the chart, press the left arrow key and then enter to make new lines above it.

15 Enter a heading to describe what the chart shows

16 to edit the chart, double click on it. A data table will appear and you can also change almost every part of the chart.

17 If you wish to change the order of things displayed in the chart you have to re-arrange them in the datasheet that opens, not the original table. (If you do change the original table you will need to make a new chart as there is no link between the table and the chart in Word.)

18 It is usually a good idea to have labels on the axes to say what the units or categories are – there aren’t any in this example.

Note: Microsoft must have some deal with printing ink suppliers because all their default charts, and those in Excel, have grey shaded backgrounds. Totally unecessary - indeed, they make what can be a boring subject for some look even more tedious! Get rid of them. It's called the plot area and, once selected, can be changed. No fill is a good bet or, if you must have a background, you can choose from almost anything you want, including pictures. There are some more notes of that here.