Setting Options, and customizing the Drawing toolbar.
Under Tools, Options (Alt-t o), set the following:
“View” tab: Print and Web Layout Options—check Drawings and Object Anchors
“General” tab: If you are using Office XP, UNcheck “Automatically create Drawing Canvas when inserting AutoShapes”
(The Drawing Canvas is a new feature in Word 2002, designed to make it easy to create a complex shape. I have yet to discover any value to it, and find it to be simply a nuisance.)
“Edit” tab: Check “Enable click and type”. This may be useful when you are working with a drawing, since it allows you to position text in relation to the drawing without hitting the Enter key repeatedly.
If you are using Word 2002, I recommend unchecking “Show Paste Option Buttons”. These buttons get in the way, and even sneak there way into my web documents!
Read the rest of this entry »
Google Apps for Education: ePortfolio and Formative Assessment Workflow
Schools and universities can set up free Google Apps accounts with their own domain name, where they can give all student and faculty acces to a variety of tools, including a GMail account, iGoogle portal, Google Groups for collaboration, and Pages, for creating websites. Each user can also use their GMail account to activate other Google services, such as GoogleDocs. Students and teachers have email accounts, with more than 2 GB of storage per account. Gmail is the web-based or POP-mail account that is also the common ID for other Google applications.
Read the rest of this entry »
Writing documents in Microsoft Word™ is convenient and produces good looking results, but posting these documents to web sites presents a problem. Students who do not have a copy of Word installed can not view the documents. When a person without Word left-clicks on the link to the word document, they will be prompted to download the doc as a file. If they figure out how to download it and then try to open it, they will be presented with several unfriendly looking windows asking them how to open the file. This is more than enough to scare off the average student.
Read the rest of this entry »
This How To shows you how to create and configure a custom least-privileged service account to run an ASP.NET Web application. By default, an ASP.NET application on Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and IIS 6.0 runs using the built-in Network Service account. In production environments, you usually run your application using a custom service account. By using a custom service account, you can audit and authorize your application separately from others, and your application is protected from any changes made to the privileges or permissions associated with the Network Service account. To use a custom service account, you must configure the account by running the Aspnet_regiis.exe utility with the -ga switch, and then configure your application to run in a custom application pool that uses the custom account’s identity.
Read the rest of this entry »
A computer virus is a parasitic program written intentionally to alter the way your computer operates without your permission or knowledge. A virus attaches copies of itself to other files and, when activated, may damage files, cause erratic system behavior, or display messages.
Read the rest of this entry »
There have been several reports of “printing problems” in MS Word reported over the last couple of months. After much research and testing, I believe that I have been able to determine the probable cause of these problems and a potential fix.
Read the rest of this entry »
The Microsoft Office 2007 suite utilizes a new file format known as Open XML. This new format introduces an “x” at the end of the file extension (see Figure 1) and will affect compatibility between the versions for the following programs: Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
Read the rest of this entry »
Web search services are among the most heavily used applications on the World Wide Web. Perhaps because search is used in such a huge variety of tasks and contexts, the user interface must strike a careful balance to meet all user needs. We describe a study that used eye tracking methodologies to explore the effects of changes in the presentation of search results. We found that adding information to the contextual snippet significantly improved performance for informational tasks but degraded performance for navigational tasks. We discuss possible reasons for this difference and the design implications for the better presentation of search results.
Read the rest of this entry »