Tuesday, September 06, 2011

Welcome Back ... Welcome to Fall 2011

This is my first post for Fall 2011. I wanted to update everyone about Office 2007 v Office 2010. The college is now teaching Office 2010. I have tested our computers with Word 2010 and PowerPoint 2010 documents. They open fine and they have the same extension as the 2007 versions. So for us and for students the differences should be transparent!

Thanks to Jane Maringer in the High Tech Center/ DRC for helping us test this.

If you have any questions, please let me know

Dana

Friday, April 22, 2011

eBook news

As you may already know, our ebook collections will be hosted by Ebsco starting on or about July 1, 2011.

There will be a couple of changes due to Ebsco buying NetLibrary. One difference is our students will be access the ebooks through the EbscoHost interface instead of the stand alone NetLibrary ebook interface. They should also still have access through our catalog records. An even bigger difference is the single user restriction appears to be gone. I just opened the same ebook on two different computers.

Here is a link if to the preview of the service. Oncampus link to preview of eBooks in EbscoHost

Please email me if you would like the link to access this preview from off campus.

Note that eBooks are an additional 'database' in EbscoHost. As such, currently you must use the Choose Databases link to search that database. Do we want to make it one of the default databases after the change in July?

Thursday, March 10, 2011

'Saving' a file to a pdf

Happy Mardi Gras (a few days late)

For those of us that work with students at the student computers, we often get asked to help a student with some aspect of using the Dietary Analysis program (on computers LIB008-LIB010). The primary question we get is how to 'save' their reports to a pdf document. Here are the basic steps.
Note: a pdf is an electronic printout so the trick is that we are printing the document to a pdf.
1. Student completes the data input and chooses to print the reports.
2. Select the PrimoPDF printer.
3. When the interactive window comes up, leave the SaveAs selection to Ask When Creating PDF
4. Click on the Create PDF button
4. The student will be prompted to enter the filename and point at the drive or folder in which to save the document, click on the Save button. This creates the file and saves it to the drive and folder you selected.
5. The file is now ready to upload to the instructor.