We are going...where no IT class has been before!

It's a big break for our whole class! As you know if you've read my previous posts; lately we've been working with Microsoft Word. Also, we found 10 things we didn't know about Microsoft Word, well we turned one of those into a tutorial. For those of you who don't know what a tutorial is, it's basically an instructional guide to perform something. Mr. Case told us about how he wanted to take our tutorials and perhaps turn them into a sort of instructional manual for Microsoft Word. He's tried this year after year and yet it always fails due to some fault in the procedure. So we're going at it again this year and I really hope we can achieve what nobody else has! I've always wanted more of my work to be published and being able to do it with everybody else will be even more fun! I've also been voted to be editor along with three other people (Yes, I'm so excited about it that I just had to tell everybody!) If we work together I'm sure we can produce a great end result, so let's do our best!

Letter-writing Cheats

This week we started to learn about creating form letters and how to use the mail merge tool in Microsoft Word. First of all a form letter is a letter that has pretty much the same text body but some aspects of it are changed. Usually this would be the name of the person etc.

Example Form Letters:

Dear Riku,
You are invited to the Stars Banquet on Thursday night. We would really appreciate it if you would attend. Please let us know if you will be coming ASAP.

Sincerely,

Mr. and Mrs. Yamaguchi



Dear Kyoko,
You are invited to the VIP Dance on Friday night. We would really appreciate it if you would attend. Please let us know if you will be coming ASAP.

Sincerely,

Mr. and Mrs. Yamaguchi

As you can see the two letters here are very similar and only the name of the recipent, the occasion and date have been changed.

Form letters make it much easier for us to get people the same message without having to write or type out all the information each time. So let's say you have thank you letters, or invitations to send out you can easily send out the same letter with just a few things changed quite easily using Microsoft Word and this is how to do it!

Mail Merging Instructions:

1) First of all open up a word document and click tools>mail merge.

2) Now a pop-up window should be present on your screen. Under 'main document' click 'create and click 'form letters'.

3) After you have done that another pop-up window will open and it will ask you if you would like to create your form letter using the already active window (the one that you have opened) or a new document. Choose the one that you are most comfortable with, I myself find the active window option easier.

4) Now as you can see you have unlocked the next part of creating a form letter. Under 'data source' click 'get data' and click 'create data source.

5) Another pop-up window should be open now. This pop-up window will allow you to create the options for the changing parts of the text in your form letter. These changing parts are called 'fields'. As you can probably see in your pop-up window you are allowed to enter a field name or choose one of the existing ones. I suggest creating your own. You can make fields for the name of the person, an address or anything else that you would like to change in your text. Type in your field name and click ok to create as many fields as you wish.
*Note: Remember to remove the existing field names by selecting them and clicking 'remove field name' and then create your own!

6) After you have done that another pop-up window will open up, which you will use to save your document. Type in a name for your file that you will easily remember and press okay.

7) For this step...yes another pop-up window! What a surprise! Click 'edit data source' on this pop-up window. Now you can enter in the specifics for the fields! Each time you fill out all the fields for one letter, this one set of data will be known as a record.

Example:

Name: Cherry
Favourite food: cherries

Name: Candy
Favourite food: candy

This is an example of what you would do when you enter in specifics for the fields. Note that my fields are the name and favourite food and not the information I have entered. Above I have created two different recordsl

8) Once you have created as many of these as you want, click ok. Now you can type in your message, but wait! It isn't like any other message. You type your message but everytime you want to put down one of the things that will vary in your form letter click 'insert merge field' (this should be displayed right below all the other toolbars as an extra tool bar at this stage). You choose the field you want and click and then continue with your message placing the fields where necessary.
*Note: If you ever wish to edit your data source you can always go into tools>mail merge>edit.

9) When you're all done with that the last thing to do is click tools>mail merge>merge. A new document with all the different letters with different specifics should open up. Now you can do whatever you want with them! Wasn't that much easier than typing them all out?

Ear invaders get ready to face revenge!

The newest assignment: Create your own Podcast about a topic that will be provided to you.

Though we haven't started on this project just as yet, we're all very curious and excited about it. To complete this assignment we'll be using the program "Audacity." Once you download this program from sourceforge.net, you'll have a fully functional recording studio right at your fingertips! This sounded like a lot of fun so I downloaded Audacity this weekend.

I spent sometime experimenting with Audacity, I found the Karaoke version for a song and had my sister sing over it. After that I experimented with different songs and effects. I tried speeding up and slowing the song down, fading, and adding an echo. These are just a few basic features available with Audacity but there is truly a lot more that you can do.

Also, last class we shared our discoveries about Microsoft Word. Most of the ones presented I have already listed but there were some new ones that Mr. Case showed us how to use effectively.