Farewell, IS101

     I took IS101 as an elective, and I didn't know exactly what I was getting into. I was familiar with what information technology and information systems were, but I wondered what my professor and classmates were going to be like, the classwork, etc.

    Getting to fully learn the ins and outs of Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint was really fun. I always used Google for these things, but now I'm definitely going to be using Microsoft. As for the classwork, getting LabSim tasks done after spending minutes trying to understand what it was asking me, taking hours in the Fun with Functions worksheet to figure out the formulas, I found it both gruesome but satisfactory at the end.

    Although I enjoyed doing the classwork, I found myself enjoying the people around me the most. After all, a big part of college is forming relationships and making connections with others. I liked seeing people have similar experiences with me before this class and during this class and the presentations they shared. Blogger was a good way to interact with each other as well. I know I wasn't much of a talker, but I felt welcomed in this class and everyone treated each other kindly.

    Lastly, I'd like to thank Professor Wu as he's been incredibly supportive for each of us, even doing a Webex meeting at 10PM with me one time because I couldn't figure out a formula for Fun with Functions. And as everyone goes on their separate ways, I hope everyone finds success and happiness in their lives.

How to Deliver a Powerpoint Presentation to a Non-live Audience

     Whenever you create a PowerPoint, it is very likely that you are using that PowerPoint to deliver a presentation to a live audience. But what if you're not presenting live? Let's say you're a teacher who teaches an online class where you upload PowerPoint lectures, or maybe even an employee who needs to share a PowerPoint to other employees who can't attend your presentation. PowerPoint not only has the tools to assist in live presentations, but also when you're not presenting to a live audience.

    In the Slide Show tab in the ribbon, there is a feature named Custom Slide Show. This feature allows us to give a presentation on slides we choose to include. By clicking on that button and creating a new custom slide show in the window, you can manually select which slides you want to present and even reorder them to your liking. To run that custom slideshow, click the Custom Slide Show button again and then click the one you just made. If you simply want to hide a slide, you can just click the Hide Slide button as well.

    The Rehearse Timings feature is incredibly useful no matter if you're presenting live or not. When selected, it displays a timer to see how much time you spend on a slide (which can be paused), giving you an opportunity to rehearse your slides over and over. It will also show the time you've spent overall in your presentation. It even gives you the choice if you want to save the your timings if you want to play the slideshow automatically.

    Lastly, the Record Slideshow option is quite similar to the Rehearse Timings feature, except that you narrate and annotate your slides as part of the recording. You get a laser pointer, pen, and highlighter to annotate. This would be something you would see a teacher use when giving an online lecture, using the laser pointer to point to what they're talking about and the pen to write whatever they please.

    If you decided to record your slideshow and want to upload a video of it, click the File button at the top left, then Export, and then Create a Video. Here, you can choose the video compression quality as well as the recorded timings and narrations if you chose to save them. If you don't want to use narrations or annotations, click on the dropbox and select Don't Use Recorded Timings and Narrations. All slides will then spend however much time as you choose in the dropbox below.

    So whether you're teaching an online class or posting a PowerPoint presentation for employees who can't attend your presentation, PowerPoint has all the things you need in order to present a PowerPoint to a non-live audience.

Outlines: The Remedy For Complex Data

     When displaying data in an Excel spreadsheet, it's often a daunting task for the creator and the viewer to comprehend that data, especially when that data is shown through fifty rows or more. Dragging your mouse wheel back and forth to navigate a spreadsheet can get quite tiring, but the solution to that lies in an outline. Like the definition, outlines in Excel summarize data by sorting the data into as many categories as the creator wishes, such as quantity, the item itself, the date, etc. This can serve especially useful for transactional data, such as records of sales or trades. So, if you ever need to sort a bunch of data, look to use an outline.

    To create an outline, select any cell in the data array and then click Subtotal in the Data tab. This will open up a dialog box where you can choose which categories for the data to be sorted in as well as where you want the subtotals to be. The dialog box also asks what calculation to be used, including the sum, average, etc. You can also easily remove an outline in the same dialog box by clicking Remove All.

    Outlines further make things easier by displaying a row of buttons on the left-hand column of Excel, where you can collapse and expand the already sorted data to show specific data based on what categories you selected.

    To use a real world example, we can look at the sales data of a bakery that was used in the video for 5.10.1. The data shows the date and time of every sale of each product as well as the price and amount that was sold throughout a weekly basis. Let's say you wanted to find the total sales for the week. You could easily find the sum by using the sum function, but if you wanted to find the sum for each day, that would be both time consuming and mistake-prone to create formula for each day. If you were to create an outline of the data based on the date, you can use the subtotal method described earlier, where it will add a subtotal for each date of the week that includes the total amount made in that day and a grand total located at the bottom. As said before, you can also collapse and expand this data using the row of buttons on the left-hand column. By pressing 1, 2, and 3, you can see the grand total itself, the subtotals for each date, and the full list respectively.

    By learning about outlines in Excel, you can easily spare the stress for you and future viewers of your data by filtering your data to your heart's desire.

There Are More to Fonts Than Just Arial

    When looking at a Microsoft Word document, people mainly see popular fonts like Arial, Times New Roman, and the notorious Comic Sans. But when are other fonts seen being used? When creating a Word document, the choice of what font to use is one of the most overlooked factors. Many people stick to common fonts when they can expand their horizons and incorporate a variety of font styles in their document. Changing the style, color, and size of a font can make your document not only more readable but also more personalized to represent yourself and/or the ideas you want to incorporate into your work.

    When choosing a font, it must be the upmost priority to make sure that it is readable. That must mean that the size, color, and the font itself must be appropriately tuned. For instance, if you were to apply a pastel color onto a white background, that would be impossible to see. It's important to find a contrast between font color and the background of the paper. As for the font style, each and every one have their own appeals. Courier New has a typewriter-like appearance, so if you're making a document with that kind of aesthetic, that font would fit right in.

    That is not to say that using common fonts is a bad thing. The point of this blog is not to shun on the popular fonts, but to encourage people to experiment outside from what they're used to when it comes to font choice. Formal writing serves as an example when it's appropriate to use a specific font (mainly Times New Roman) as it is required to do so. Although it's true that formal writing requires a specific font style, that still does recognize the fact that font choice is important. Using a less formal font would result in the reader not taking the author and their work seriously.

    To sum things up, choosing what font to use is an underrated factor when creating a document, no matter what kind of document you're making. The style, size, and color all play a part into the process. It all depends on what your document is about and the aesthetic you want to go for. Readability, proper emphasis, and its aesthetic are things you should be looking for when choosing a font.

Microsoft Office: How to Truly Make Files Accessible for Everyone

    Most people already know the ins and outs of creating documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, but how many of those people know how to make sure their files are accessible for their viewers? Finishing the creation of your file doesn't exactly mean that you are ready to publish your work to your audience. Section 3.6.4 of our LabSim goes in depth on exactly how to add security to your work and make your work accessible for all people so it can published.

    First and foremost, sensitive information may be included in your work. To prevent this information from being accessible to unwanted people, it is highly recommended to encrypt your file with a password to be shared by people you choose. Personal metadata, such as your name, is also recommended to remove. To remove personal metadata, simply inspect your document and click the "Remove All" button by the "Document Properties and Personal Information" section. To further increase security, making sure others can't edit your file is essential. To do this, click the "Mark as Final" button in the "Protect" section, making viewers of your file only able to read it.

    After securing personal information, we must also look another important factor: making sure our work can be accessible for every single person in your audience. Such an example would be people who don't have Microsoft Office to begin with. If people don't have Excel and you are trying to share a spreadsheet with them, they won't be able to access your spreadsheet unless you turn your embedded charts into images. And if they don't have the latest version of Office, you must check for backward compatibility. Backward compatibility gives users access your files, even if they don't have the latest version of Office. To delve into the matter further, we must include people with disabilities into our audience. If any of our viewers are visually impaired, we can add alternate text into our images or charts, which basically adds a text description to the image or chart.

    In summary, the process of protecting our document and making sure everyone can easily access our files is just as important as the process of creating such files.

Learning About Careers in Computer Programming

    Being a computer science major, the video from section 2.7.9 gave me a great amount of information about some of the careers that focus on programming and software development. It would be wise of me to learn about the career paths that relate to my major so that I can eventually pursue one of them.

    This video gives information about application developers, web developers, quality assurance (QA) engineers, and database programmers. Each career has their own disciplines, but I found the most interest in web development. They create websites and other things accessible through the Internet. They are also highly developed in programming, which I also find interest in. I took CIT129 last term, which taught me the basic of programming in Python. Being given a task, figuring out how to execute the task, solving the mistakes I made in my code, and the satisfaction of finally making my code work gave me enjoyment.

    After gaining a quick glance at some of the most common careers in programming and web development, I begin to think about my long-term goals that circulate around my interests and my strengths.

Is Internet Privacy Really Private?

    I read 1.3.5  from Chapter 1 of my TestOut Office Pro, which covered the topic of Internet privacy and how the information we give out can be taken advantage of. A lot of people, including myself, can get a little too easygoing when it comes to Internet privacy. Not to mention the Terms of Use part, which I bet almost everyone ignores. Some people don't realize that no an app or website is truly free. Websites such as Facebook and Google extract our metadata (information about information) to either use for advertising purposes or to sell it to other companies. Another example would be posting on a private account, which isn't truly private as it is still available to third-party users.

    Also section also talks about how to handle company devices. It should be known that company devices (prominently computers) and the network infrastructure are owned by the company and can therefore access whatever a user does on their device. Thus companies have an Acceptable Use Policy on their devices to prevent their employees from doing the wrong things with their devices. But even if you're not doing anything wrong, companies can still access stored data when doing things such as sending a private email.

    In order to hide as much information as possible, it would be wise to incorporate fully reading the Terms of Use and Acceptance Use Policy, creating strong passwords, never using public Wi-Fi while purchasing online, and most importantly have a good digital footprint. After reading about this, I'll be sure to refrain from giving too much information while I'm on the Internet.

Organizing My Outlook Email

     In for our first assignment in my IS101 class, I was instructed to create folders in my email account for unique purposes. For example, I made a folder specifically for IS101 assignments, canvas notifications, etc. To do this, we created rules in the settings tab that allowed me to specify where I want each email to go depends on certain rules. And to be honest, this was the first time I have organized folders and sorted out emails. I always used the inbox and the "All Mail" folder. 

    For Task 8 of A1 and the second discussion, I was required to create a rule of my own and to share it with others. I've posted mine on Canvas, but what I chose to do was create a rule that puts any email from blogger.com into a folder named Blog. I thought it was a good idea since we'd be using this website often. In case anyone wants to use this rule, I do have to note that there is more than one email from blogger.com that sends emails to your inbox. As of now I have found two: noreply-comment@blogger.com and noreply+subscribe@blogger.com. So for the condition where you put who the email is from, put both emails. If I happen to find more emails, I will update this blog fixing it. After completing this assignment, I felt much more knowledgeable on how to organize my emails. I will definitely use this for my personal emails.

My First IS101 Class

    From the jump, Professor Wu gave reinforced the important lesson of getting ahead on tasks. Even before today, he gave me an opportunity to get a head start in IS101. My first impression of him is that he is punctual but fair. He is respectful towards everyone and I believe he wants all of his students to succeed. It's only been my first day, but I've enjoyed Professor Wu's class and I'm excited to learn as much as I can.