Master Foo's Institute of Technology

Tutorial the Third - Programs

Tut 3 - Funnnnnnnnnnnnn

While I am sure you love learning about how to install font files, I am also sure that you want to do something _interesting._ So we bring you our recommendations for interesting programs that you can use to do everyday (and not-so-everyday) things.

games?

No games. If you want games to entertain yourself, google and buy one for ~$50

Web Browsers

Let's face it: many people use the computer to surf the internet. We'll show how to do it in style, or at least somewhat competently. So let's install our favorite browser, Firefox. (if circumstances prevent you from installing Firefox, you can always try IE7, and if that's impossible, then... well, bug your admin until he installs at least IE7 everywhere. Or, if you're cool, you can get portable firefox.

Installing firefox is quite easy; just go firefox 1, download firefox, and, double clicking the installer, just go through the steps (defaults should be fine) and you'll have firefox! If you can't install because you're not an administrator on that computer, just download portable firefox and run that. Now, open up a copy of firefox and this should show up:

image

Navigation - Refresher

Now, let's get to google. Try typing "google.com" (no quotes) 2 into this box:

image

If you're connected to the internet, you should be able to see the typical sparse google homepage.

If you aren't totally new to the world of internet browsers, you surely must know about the ubiquitous back and forward buttons.

image - label back and forward

If not, now you do (what they look like, at least.) Their function is fairly close to what their names imply: they move back and forth among web pages.

If you feel shaky about what the back and forward buttons do, (most people don't) then you can try this: first, type "hello" into google, and you should get a screenful of stuff. Now hit the back button. It goes back to the google homepage! Now hit forward. It's right back to the "hello" search results. It's just a quick way to look through the pages you've already been to. However, if you hit back, and then click on a different link, then click back again, hitting forward will only bring you to the site that you've most recently clicked on. An image example:

image

Also, another caveat appears when using the back button when buying things online. If you hit back while you're in the middle of buying something online, you could very well charge your card twice, but only get one copy of whatever you're buying. Just something to look out for.

Now, links. Going back to the "hello" search page, there'll be a bunch of links that look like this. Clicking on one of them should take you to a new page. We reproduce a part of the search below:

box

The large heading (at the top) is the main link: it'll bring you to the page that google thinks somehow relates to your search. Below is a description, and after that is the address and two more links to a cached version of the page and a page of similar searches. The top link is the one we're really concered about, and if it were a serious search, I'd have you click on it and take a look. You could still do so if you want to. Every other search engine is essentially the same, and you can also click on links on other pages. Have fun!

search engines

We've already raved to you about google so much you surely must have figured out that it searches the web and returns pages that relate to the term. If you haven't figured it out, well, now you know. To be fair, other search engines exist, like MSN live search or Yahoo, to name the bigger ones. If you want to find more, just type "search engine" into google and take a look.

Branching navigation

Now, we know how to navigate through the web: search, click link, click back if we want to. However, sometimes, after quickly perusing a search page, there'll a couple interesting things. Which to click on? Opening them in seperate windows will just clutter everything, and doing one at a time can be tedious or cause you to forget what you are doing. If you've been nodding your head, tabs are quite useful. Let's try this: middle click 3 on this link. Now, you should have a tab bar at the top of your viewing window:

image - selected and not selected

Click on the tab that isn't selected, and the whole viewing pane should now be displaying an entirely new page. Now, click on the other tab: your original page should be back. Nifty, eh?

Middle button elsewhere

You might have noticed that if you don't hit the middle button on a link, then a little image with an up and down arrow appears, and you can scroll with it. It's useful for scrolling quickly.

Now, let's move on to one more topic that not too many people know about: mouse gestures. In some cases, it's really cool, but some people just don't like it. So, let's go and grab the mouse gestures extension for firefox at the official firefox extensions respitory. Simply install it (it shouldn't be hard) and restart firefox when it asks you to. Now, let's go back to that "hello" search, and try dragging your mouse left while right clicking. Tada! It should have went back a page. Now, try doing it again, but dragging right. Now it goes forward! There are many, many commands you can do with mouse gestures, but these are probably the ones you'll use most. If you need these, here they are:

reload page - make a little loop, down, right, and then up. close tab - go down, and then to the right.

Click gestures

In the same vein of mouse gestures, you can also use click gestures under the mouse gestures extension. Just do a right-click and then a left click in quick succession to go back, or vice-versa to go forward.

IE7

IE7 is, quite simply, a much better option than IE6 (security being one, big, thing), but not nearly as good as Firefox 2.0. Enough browser bashing: It has tabs, just like firefox, and does most other browsing well. It also has mouse gestures, also as an extension, here. If you don't already have it, you should retrieve it through windows update.

Opera

Most people use IE or Firefox. With that said, this is yet another browser that is relatively popular, once you discount his big brothers (around .5% popular, that is). But it circumvents a problem present in Firefox (it eats up memory (makes you computer slower)) and... well, there's not too much of a reason to use it instead of IE, where it comes down to personal preference to which one feels more snappy. Also, if it swings things, Opera has in-built mouse gestures.

Office Suites

The next most popular reason to use computers is to write reports. Okay, so we're not serious: not too many people relish pounding out reports on the computer. But, it still has to be done, whether it's for school or work. So, we'll look at two text processing suites: the ubiquitous Microsoft Office, and Open Office. Both are fairly similar, so we'll look at them in general, and comment on the idiosyncracies of Open Office in a note.

Word processing

Well, it does what the name implies: it formats text in a pretty way, either for printing or passing over the internet, although mostly for print. Here is our ever friendly Microsoft Word:

image

So, you have the central text input pane, and a bunch of accompanying toolbars. You input text into the central pane, (simple) and format it (not so simple). As a working example, we'll make a brochure from scratch (it's not as straight forward as a letter, nor will it blow right over people's heads.)4.

Example-Brochure

We'll start with nothing, except an empty Office 2000 document:

image

Add columns (First, File>Page Setup>Paper Size>Landscape, then Format>Columns>Three). Now, we have to think about how the brochure will come out of the printer: one page will have the front, back, and infold, while the other page will have the interior of the brochure. Using the text box tool on the drawing toolbar:

image

We'll layout everything:

image - layout, all

This particular brochure will be about bannanas. Thus, we'll add the relevant information to the skeleton we've already laid out:

image - information added

And now, using these formatting opitions, and throwing in a photo, we get the following:

image

Wow! rewind...

Formatting text

We'll use our title as an example: selecting the entire thing, go to the text formatting toolbar and set it to these settings:

image - formatting

Now, your text should have the same look. You don't have to (shouldn't) copy whatever we used to format our document: be creative!

Screwing around with the text for long enough will get you the look you want, eventually. It's just a matter of time. However, there are a few extra steps to include pictures or clip art into your document, and textboxes aren't all about laying down text.

Pictures in Documents

If you want the bannana picture, you'll need to download this picture and then do Insert>Picture>From File, navigating to where you put your picture. If you want some other pictures, perhaps from the web5, do everything in the same way. Microsoft's default clip art library isn't huge, and after a while, you start seeing the same clips over and over because no one bothers to make their own, so unless you're under an intense schdule, please bother to find something better.

We're not done yet! If you try to drag the picture where you want it, it doesn't budge. So, we right-click>Format Picture>Layout>Tight or Square. Now, the black handles on the corners of the picture become white, and you can drag your picture all over the page. As a quick note, the corner handles will scale 1:1, that is, the ratio of their side to bottom will stay the same. Moving the side handles, though, will change the ratio. End note.

Textboxes

Textboxes are a great tool to get a layout quickly and easily. However, you can't overuse them, just like most tools. If just pounding out text and formating it will do, then don't do overkill. With that said, let's take a look at textboxes.

I'm sure that by know, you know that the white handles on the sides of the box will resize your box. Moving it is a little more tricky, though. Simply clicking and dragging inside the box won't do the job, just select text inside it. Clicking first on the border, though, and then dragging from the border (the shaded part) should do it. Also, the way to get rid of the border is right-click on the border>Format Text Box>Colors and Lines>Line>Color>No Line. Tada! No line. And if you want to put a picture behind the text, then you'll want to set the fill to no fill.

If you want, you can download the end word or the open office file.

LaTeX

If you want real formatting, then you want LaTeX. It's not at all like Word, where what you type is what you print: instead, you tell LaTeX that "this is a heading, this is a title, this is a paragraph" and LaTeX will make it look nice for you. How to write LaTeX is outside the scope of this tutorial, but if you're intruiged, you can look here.

Presentations

Image

If you're still going through schooling below college, chances you'll have to make a powerpoint are high. However, we're not going to walk through how to defy the standards: if you have to make a powerpoint, use the slide templates they give you. It's just that simple, mostly because if you start using music/sound effects, or forcing your viewers to look at different designs in each slide, it begins to get annoying. Unless you know what you're doing, keep it simple.

Spreadsheets

image

We'll try to keep the pain to a minimum for our less mathematically-inclined readers, so we'll go right on in with terms. A cell is one square of the sheet, while a column is, well, a column, and a row is a row. Sheets are supposedly infinite in size, or at least as large as you would ever need them to be. Formulas are the core of the sheet, and are input here:

image

Today, we'll make a simple spreadsheet that takes the expenses of Bob, our invisible friend, and compares it to what we had budgeted to spend using some simple formulas. First, the data:

Now, input it into our spreadsheet like so (drop the dollar signs for simplicity):

table columns - budg, expn

And select the cell B10 (bottom of the first column of numbers). Now, hit the = button, and you'll get this mini-dialouge:

image

Just enter this ino the formula box; =sum(B2:B5). Tada! The cell should now hold the sum of your budget. Now, there should be a black handle on the lower right of the cell. Drag that to the right, to the next right cell below your expenses. Now, to take the difference, go to the cell to the right of your sum of expenses, and enter =B6-C6. Now, your difference should show up: did Bob use more money than his budget allowed? Of course! If you want to know, the final difference is -95.

What about Access(databases), Publisher(publishing), or Frontpage(web pages)?

Well, if you want to go that deep, then I'm sure you can get the training else where. There are plenty of tutorials that would cover them in much greater detail elsewhere (google is your friend!).

Office 2007

If you already have your hands on a copy of Office 2007, you'll notice the semi-absolution of toolbars and the incorporation of "the ribbon". Now, we can't tell you too much about it, mostly because we all don't have copies of it. Still, the basic functions should be the same, and if Microsoft is right, it should be easy to pick up.

Open Office

This is an effort by the open source community to create a free clone of Microsoft Office. It is very, very similar (can save in .doc or .odt format), and while it lacks a few features in contrast to office, OO has one somewhat cool feature: it can output pdf documents, although Word 2007 has an extension that can do the same thing. Since it's free, if you can handle the hefty download, you can try it out and decide if it meets your needs.

Image editing

Again, you have a few different options: the ever-present paint, the gimp, or photoshop. If you've been around, photoshop should sound familiar, and who hasn't played around with paint6? We'll give a tutorial on how to use the gimp here.

Paint is really simple. Guarunteed. It's also constraining, but that's another matter. Drawing lines, etc, should just come naturally. But, did you know pressing shift while drawing a line will snap it to the nearest 45 degrees? It comes in handy. Also, the two color thing:

image

is merely a way of saying "use the top color for drawing lines, and if you want to, use the lower color for the fill". Then, the little Image menu has some interesting things, most of which are self-explanatory. The Attributes item, though, is useful: you can set exactly how big, pixel-wise, your picture is. Colors->Edit Colors is also a nifty tool, as it releases you from having to restrict yourself to the colors on the bottom of the screen.

One more thing is the lower right handle. When your cursor turns into a resize handle, you can click and resize the image without having to do Image->Attributes.

the gimp

We already said, we have a tutorial.

photoshop

If you aren't poor, then you can get photoshop. Photoshop (CS2) is what the pros use, and it's top notch stuff.

Audio and Video Players

In contention for the first reason anyone would want to use a computer is playing music or video. The three major contenders for playing back music and video are itunes, windows media player, and realplayer, which are all pretty good at what they do. If you plan on buying music or video over the internet, then itunes is the way to go, as window's URGE hasn't quite proven itself yet. Or you could do your research and find some of the small third party stores out there. If you also have an ipod or zune, then the choice is really easy: ipod only works with itunes, and the zune only works with windows media player.

IM

Another fun thing to do with your computer is talk to people. You might have AIM, MSN Messanger, Yahoo Messanger or Google talk already, but you probably know people that don't use your service of choice. If you're looking for pain, then you might run all four at the same time. There's a program called Pidgin7, though, that can connect to more im services than you would care to. Just download the version with gtk from pidgin's download page8.

Adding accounts should be intuitive, although the only convoluted part should be adding gtalk accounts9. If you want to talk to your friends on the gtalk network, make a new jabber account with the following settings:

You should now be able to sign into gmail servers10!

If pidgin doesn't cut it for you, then try out trillian, which is another multi-im client. If you want audio or video chat, then you want trillian. The reason I don't use it is because trillian can't access gtalk accounts unless you buy the pro version, and... well, I'm cheap.

Email

We think that you don't need a seperate mail client for email. If you already have one, like outlook, then you can go on using that. If you can, though, we recommend using one of the free email services:

It's reliable, and you can access your mail without a client on different computers.

Miscellaneous

7-zip image

If you hang around the web long enough, you'll eventually find these files with .tgz or .rar extensions. They're like .zip files, but different, so Windows doesn't recognize them. 7-zip is probably one of the most comprehensive archive managers, and I haven't run into anything that it can't unzip (excepting password protected things, of course.)

You can get it here.

Blender

This is a free 3d content generation tool.

image

Yes? It's one of the best free ones out there, and development isn't going to slow down soon. It's quite fun to play with, but it has a steep initial learning curve. Getting past the first few weeks, though, is definitely worth it.

You can get it here.

3d studio max

This is blender's big brother. He's also expensive, so if you have money to burn, you can try out 3ds max.

Google Products

We love google. What else can we say?

Google desktop

XP comes with a built-in search function that is very, very slow. Google desktop is near instantaneous with searching your computer11 and it turns out to be quite useful at times. Get it here.

Picasa

I dump all of my pictures into various folders around my computer. Then again, most of those pictures don't need to see the light of day, so I don't every bother to organize them, but picasa would probably be a great help. After trying it out, it's a nice cataloger and organizer. I would recommend this for people that would otherwise dump their photos into giant folders, like me. Take a gander here.

Now that we've given you all sorts of toys, you're going to run into some sort of trouble eventually. And that's what the next tutorial is for.


1 If firefox isn't there (which would be very suprising), you can always google firefox.
2 The quotes are there to show what to type in.
3 if you don't have a middle mouse button, just click both your right and left buttons at the same time.
4 Also, it won't stick to the lay-down-text-and-format it; it's more about design with textboxes. Certainly, you can do brochures in word without textboxes, but that's just laying down text and formatting it.
5 If you're going to take pictures from the web, make sure that the author will let you use them.
6 If you have never played with paint, 1. you haven't really looked at your computer, have you? and 2. you are missing out on one of life's little joys. Quickly, go find paint and do something with it!
7 Yes, it was called Gaim, but AOL, who has the AIM trademark, complained, and to reach a settlement the Gaim team chose a new name.
8 Currently, the latest beta is 2.0.0beta6, and is, in my opinion, better than the stable 1.5. If pidgin hasn't changed to 2.0 yet, then you can get beta 6.
9 As of now, pidgin can't call or receive calls over gtalk.
10 The information is on Google's help pages.
11 Vista comes with a similar function.