Dear, Mr/Mrs/student/teacher ?

Have you ever wanted to write a letter to a group of people, but just didn't have time to write different letters to everyone? Well here's a trick that's cool. Its called Mail Merge. You can find this feature on Word. You simply go to format, Mailing and letters. Then something on the side of your page will appear asking you to choose your recipients. You don't have to spend all your time writing a separate letter to everyone. You can simply put each person's information into a template, and save it there. Once you are ready to write your letter, type one copy. And for each person, you just insert their name, address and information from a mailing list. Companies use this often. For example, when you get a letter saying that you have just won an all expense payed trip to Hawaii, with your name, address and information on it, be sure that the company has sent the same letter to many other people, but have just changed their name, address and information to match them. This is a very useful feature to use, especially when you are writing letters to a number of people, wanting to say the same thing, use mail merge.
So the next time you receive a letter saying that you have won something or to come claim your prize, be sure that the company most likely doesn't have a clue who you are, and has sent that same exact letter to all of their customers!

Bye for now.

Peggy .

Getting to know MS Word!

Today in class we came up with our title for our word book. Its getting to know MS Word. Although, we came up with other ones too, but this title was the most popular one. We haven't confirmed it hundred percent but there is a pretty good chance that we will stick to this title.
We are close to finishing our book, so that we can get them published soon.
Also Sanjida and I are working hard going around the school trying to see what every teacher has difficulty with on Word, so that we can get our FAQ's finished as soon as possible.
That's all for now.
Bye.

Peggy .

How much money will we make?

Hi. As you know, we spent the last few classes finishing up our Word books. And now that everyone is finished with it, today in class, we are thinking of ways to sell our book for good prices, but also in a way that we can get a good profit out of it. In order to figure out how much our book will cost in different ways, we went to http://www.lulu.com/en/?fLocation=/ On this site, we can choose from the many different ways we can publish our book. For example, what colour our book can be, what the paper size is, what type of book its going to be. There are four different types of books that we can choose to publish from.

1. The bind of the book. So like perfect bond, case, sudist cover etc.
2. What the colour is going to be. So either black and white or the whole thing in colour.
3. If we are going to choose hardcover or paperback.
4. The size of the page. So if you want it normal size, smaller or bigger.

Each one combined together will come up with a different price. For example, if we make our book hard cover and in colour, it will cost us approximately 15-30 dollars. And if that is the case, then we are going to have to sell them for more, and we have doubts if people will actually pay that much for a book made by high school kids. So we are looking towards a reasonable price, both for us to pay and the people who will be buying them. We have to work more with how we are going to make it, who we want to sell it and advertise it, and many more. Although we don't have a lot of time left because it takes a while to publish them and then actually get people to order them online. So we are all working on it! =]

Also, Sanjida and I are responsible for the Frequently Asked Questions section. We have to go around asking teachers about the difficulties they face when they are working with Word. Then we come up with questions and answers for our book.
Everyone is working very hard on making this book the best, under a tight schedule, but I'm sure that it will turn out really good.

That's it for today,
Bye.

- Peggy

Congrats!!

On Monday, we picked two editors for our Word book. Congratulations Mohammad and Joanna! :) They are going to be responsible for going through the whole book, when it is complete and look for mistakes, grammatical errors, plagiarism or anything else they think that should be there. We also thought of ways that we could organize the table of contents. We all came up with great ideas like place them in alphabetical order, by text and images, menu items and toolbars, skill level and authors. And at the end, we decided we would go with the idea of organizing our table of contents by Menu item. We are also going to have another chapter for the toolbars. And anything we can come up with.

See you soon.
Bye.

Peggy .

Finished yet. . ?

The last few classes, we all worked hard on trying to finish up our tutorials and get them handed in as soon as possible. I recently finished the four i was responsible for. I chose to do a very basic summary of the drawing toolbar, how to make a template, inserting picture from a file, and word art. You need to do one in order to pass, but the more you do, the more marks you'll get. But keep in mind that we are going to sell these books to others so that they can make use of them, so they need to be quality work, so that you can get full marks and also be of help.
We are working on a date to have everything finished so that we can place the orders to get our books published. Work hard!!

Tizz all,
Bye.

Peggy .

Have you tricked your computer?

Sorry i got a little behind on my blog. My computer was visiting the psychiatrist! ;) [haha, because it had problems.] A few classes ago, we were introduced to something that made our lives, by far, so much easier, and saved a huge amount of time spent in photoshop. Light screen! In my opinion, this is a great program to use if you want to cut all the time spent in photoshop or paint. As you know, every grade 9 BTT class is working on making our Word book the best it can possibly be. Each person is responsible for one feature on word, but you can do more if you want more marks. We are then going to publish these books, and sell them to teachers who need help with Word. A way to make the book as understandable as possible, we need screen shots of the features we are talking about. So here is where lightscreen comes into view. It is a program in which you can use to take screen shots of your part, easily and very quickly. This is what it looks like.


You simply click on the Screenshot area, and four options come up. Most of the times, you will choose Area. And when you click that, your whole screen goes dark and then you just choose the area you want to show. Once you've done that, your image will appear in the Light Screen folder.
You can find this feature on the school computers, in the pick-up folder. Under Case BTT. And you will see a folder that says Light Screen. You cant use this feature off of the pick-up folder. You first have to drag it to your desktop, and then download it into your home drive. But make sure that when your installing it into your home drive, turn off desktop shortcut and start menu shortcut. You can always install this feature onto your computer at home. If you want to send it to yourself by email, the trick is to right click on the program, go to properties and change the ending from exe to jpg [a picture file]. You have to do this because when you want to attach the lightscreen file, it wont allow you, so you trick the computer into thinking it is a big picture file. Attach your file, and when you get home, download it onto your computer, then go to its properties and change it back into an exe file. Then you can use it from there.
Also don't forget about finishing your tutorial because we are going to start publishing them soon. And make sure you use the template Mr.Case made so that everybodys' looks the same.

That's about it.
Bye.

Peggy .

Test your knowledge.

Today in class, everyone finished presenting the features that they chose on Microsoft Word. I learned many interesting things about Microsoft word that I didn't know I could do before. Mr.Case said that everyone is responsible for everything that everyone presents because they are going to be on the test which is coming up very soon. So listen in class and make sure you write down everything that is being said by others, or if you don't write them down and you happen to forget them later, you can simply go back and check on Word yourself. Oh and a heads up, hes going to test you on everything that is on Word 2003 because that's the most common word that everyone has, and the ones that are in the school.
So test your knowledge. See how many interesting features Word has to offer to you. I bet you will find things you never even knew word could do!

Later days.

-Peggy.