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Posted - April 02 2011 : 09:24:02
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Question: Eddie asks, "Someone emailed me a Word document. I have Word, but when I try to open the document it asks if I want to go online to find a program that can open it. Why is that?"
Answer: Good question, Eddie, I guess after all these shows, you deserve a turn. Most likely, they have Office 2007 or 2010, and you're using Office 2003 or earlier. If our listeners have the newer versions of Office and plan on sharing your work with others, you might ask which version of Office they have and save the file in a format that's compatible, right upfront. But now that two versions of Office have come out using these new formats, it’s also good for those of us using the earlier versions (I still use 2003 myself) to get Microsoft's Office Compatibility Pack. It's a free download that will let your version of Office open Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files created in the new versions of Office. We'll have a link to the download in the show notes for anyone who's interested. If you don’t have Office at all, you can download viewers for PowerPoint and for Word. You can also just download Open Office if you need an office suite and don't have one.
Cool Site: KidFunVid: YouTube can be really fun. But by itself, YouTube doesn't let you choose videos by audience. The audience I'm thinking about is younger kids. To address that problem KidFunVid.com aggregates YouTube videos that are appropriate for young children. The site is very simple to use, with tabs at the top of the page for Home, with a few of their newest videos listed, an About/Contact page that tells you a little about the site, and gives you a form you can use to contact them and suggest a video, make a comment, etc, and the other eight tabs let you alphabetically browse what's been linked there. They have an RSS feed so you can stay informed about the newest videos as they are added, or you can subscribe via email.
Cool Gadget: Microsoft Mathematics: Our listeners may not know that, among other things, I'm a math teacher. Specifically, I teach an algebra class at Lon Morris College. Well, this week's gadget is a software gadget. It's a free download from Microsoft called Microsoft Mathematics 4.0. What it amounts to is a graphing calculator application. It works on everything from Windows XP Service Pack 3 to 64-bit Windows 7. This thing can graph equations, it can do calculus, it can solve algebraic equations, convert units, do statistics, geometry, trig, and more. The graphs can be either 2D or 3D, and 3D graphs can be animated. You can print out the results, get step by step solutions for algebra problems, even save your work or export it to Word. Maybe you've forgotten how to do your kids' math; but this calculator probably remembers. I've recommended it to my students, and we'll have a link to it in the show notes.
It's All "Geek" To Me: Zip: This week's term is Zip. Talking about a file, zip is a means of combining several files into one. The zip file itself is compressed, so it's smaller than the several files contained in it. Because of this, it's faster to send from one computer to another, plus it takes less room to store. On your Windows computer, you can create and use zip files just like any other folder. They're called Compressed (zipped) Folders and on XP, the icon looks like a folder with a zipper on it.
Links
Tech Tip Friday's Show Notes RSS Feed:
http://www.daconsult.com/downloads/rss.xml
Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack at Microsoft.com:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?familyid=941B3470-3AE9-4AEE-8F43-C6BB74CD1466&displaylang=en
KidFunVid.com:
http://kidfunvid.com/
Microsoft Mathematics 4.0 at Microsoft:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9CACA722-5235-401C-8D3F-9E242B794C3A
Zip at TechTerms:
http://www.techterms.com/definition/zip |
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