Thursday, October 22, 2015

Class Summary 10-22-2015

A busy afternoon with fifteen in attendance. We began demonstrating how you can have two monitors connected to your laptop and display different windows in each. When you connect the second monitor with a VGA connector or even a TV set with an HDMI cable, you press Win+P to open the project window.





You can have only one screen in operation, or both displaying the same screen like I do in class to show you a larger view on the large TV screen of what I am doing on my laptop, or you can have one screen on the laptop active and drag windows from it to the second screen allowing you to work on two applications at once without having to switch back and forth. (BTW that is what is called a run on sentence!)


Then we had a discussion about OneDrive. It comes with Windows 7-10. When you open the File Manager you will see it in the left column. Click and it will open showing you all the folders it contains. It is like looking into all the files and folders in your Document folder. You can save files under OneDrive or in your documents, or other, folders. When you save them in OneDrive they are automatically sent to your Microsoft Cloud which is free for 15gb of data. If you do not have a Microsoft account, then you will not see the OneDrive folder in File Explorer. If you are not connected to the Internet the files are still in your OneDrive folder on your PC. When you connect to the Internet, the files are synchronized so both the Cloud and your PC have the same files. When you sign into your Live.com account, your Microsoft account, from another PC you have access to all those files. Think of it like a backup in the cloud of all your work. When you drag a file from your PC into OneDrive, the file is moved to the new location, but is still on your PC. It is just in your OneDrive folder instead of your Document folder.

When your browser is running slow it may be because you have too many items in its cache. That is a temporary place that holds data from previous browsing that will speed up access to previously viewed pages. This is good until you have so much in your browser cache that accessing it is slower as the browser has to search through all its entries to open the page you are looking to open.



To clear the cache, you can bring up the Tools window in your browser. In Chrome you can press Ctrl+Shift+Del to open the dialog box. I do not suggest clearing the cookies and plugin data, just click Clear browsing data with the checkmark on Cached images and files. Your browsing with be a little quicker.

More on browsers: understanding tabs, right-click on open tab, right-click on new tab, looking into history, using the address bar -- auto fill, ctrl+L, selecting and copying, printing, etc. And we discussed using the center button your your mouse to open a link in a new tab. The center button is the scroll wheel. Not using a mouse? Right click the link and one of the options is to open the link in a new tab.

http://www.pdfonline.com/pdf-to-word-converter/
We took a look at using the above site to convert a PDF to a Word file to be able to make changes in that file. The actual file created is not a DOC but a RTF (Rich Text FOrmat) that can be opened in any word processing program. Microsoft Word 2013 and 2016 will open a PDF and allow you to make changes to it and save it as either a DOC or a PDF file. Older versions will not opne a PDF directly, so a conversion application like this website is necessary. LibreOffice will open a PDF, but it creates and series of images opening it's Image program, not a word processing file.

https://www.pdfbuddy.com/
Use this cloud application to edit a PDF online. Not useful for making changes in a PDF. This is more for completing a PDF form--like inserting your name and address and maybe adding an image of your signature to email the completed form to someone.

Instructions on how to use this application can be found at this site:
https://www.pdfbuddy.com/how-to/edit-pdf

I know we touched on much more, but this is all I can remember tonight.

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