Indiana University: IT Training Tips Blog

You may already know that Photoshop blend modes can immeasurably enhance your creativity and playfulness. You may be familiar with the artful aspects of blend modes; however, most Photoshop users don't know they are corrective, too. Understanding how they work is a key to using them to your best advantage.

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You may have attended the IT Training & Education STEPS workshop, "Adobe Illustrator CS4: The Basics," and would like to learn more. Make lynda.com your personal trainer! If you would like a little review of Illustrator followed by more advanced concepts, see Mordy Golding's Illustrator CS4 Essential Training.

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In an earlier blog post, Veronica discusses the lynda.com training that is available for Office for the Macintosh. I was happy to see that she was sharing this information, because participants who attend the IT Training & Education PowerPoint workshops almost always have questions about PowerPoint for Mac versus PowerPoint for Windows. Is the interface exactly the same in the two applications? Do they use the same filename extensions? Can I open up and edit a Mac presentation with the Windows version? Etc., etc...

Since IU students, staff, and faculty can now access lynda.com for free, it is a great time to learn more about PowerPoint for the Mac. In David Rivers' tutorial called PowerPoint 2008 for Mac Essential Training, you can find out everything there is to know about the Mac version of this application, including how to:

• create, edit, and share professional slideshows and presentations
• efficiently navigate presentations
• apply custom themes
• place and edit text, images, and multimedia files
• publish a self-running or manual slideshow

Mac users can watch all of the modules included in this comprehensive tutorial, or they can just watch the sections they are most interested in. If you have already attended our STEPS PowerPoint workshops, you may just want to view the section called Understanding the Interface.

If you haven't yet taken any of the STEPS workshops in this series, consider attending one of the following:

1. PowerPoint: The Basics
2. PowerPoint: Enhancing & Packaging a Presentation
3. PowerPoint: Customizing a Presentation
4. PowerPoint: Project Lab 

This is the last official blog article in the lynda.com series, but you can bet that there will be more information about this fantastic learning resource in upcoming posts.

As you know, Adobe Flash is a robust platform for creating web and desktop applications as well as simple animations. IT Training & Education currently offers three workshops focused on Flash:

• Flash CS4: The Basics -- Basic instruction on the interface, drawing, and Flash concepts.
• Flash CS4: Interactivity Basics -- Introduction of ActionScript 3.0 to create interactivity using buttons in a Flash movie.
• Flash CS4: ActionScript Programming Basics -- Basic concepts in ActionScript 3.0 such as the use of control structures, collision detection and animation.

While these workshops give you a great foundation in Adobe Flash, there are many, many topics that aren't covered in-depth. Lynda.com can be used to fill in and augment the topics in these workshops. From now until December 20th, IU community members get FREE access to lynda.com. As of this writing, lynda.com offers 10 courses in Flash CS4 and 7 courses in ActionScript 3.0. Remember that the Flash platform isn't limited to the Adobe Flash software. In addition to the Flash specific courses, lynda.com offers 4 courses on Adobe Air and 10 courses in Flex. That's 31 courses about or relating to the Flash platform. To simplify things, this article will focus only on the courses related to the Flash application as well as ActionScript 3.0.

Continue after the jump!
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At IT Training & Education, we have a workshop called Acrobat 9: Forms, which teaches you the basics of creating Acrobat forms, along with how to distribute them, and collect data, along with several ways to store that data once collected.  It covers all the major aspects of creating forms in Acrobat 9 Pro.

However, there is a lesser known program called LiveCycle Designer, which is installed with Acrobat Pro, which can also create forms.  These forms can be created from a template, or a spreadsheet, and it can even start with a blank document. It can also create forms that can be connected to a database, and can create more complex calculated fields using FormCalc or JavaScript (JavaScript can also be used in Acrobat 9).  LiveCycle Designer is a much more complex program, and unfortunately we don't have time in Acrobat 9: Forms to cover it.

Now that IU students, faculty and staff can access lynda.com, you can now learn how to use this program, and create forms in a different way which might work better for your situation.  One of the main benefits of LiveCycle Designer is that it can give you a better starting point, since LiveCycle forms do not need a pre-existing file to work from, unlike Acrobat 9 Pro.
In Acrobat 9 Pro: Creating Forms from lynda.com (make sure you're logged in through IT Training & Education's lynda.com portal to access the workshop), Brian Wood covers the creation of Forms in both Acrobat Pro and LiveCycle Designer.

However, if you've already taken Acrobat 9: Forms from IT Training & Education, you can skip sections 1, 2 and 3 of the lynda.com video series, giving you a head start on getting through the rest of the videos, and saving approximately the same amount of time you would have spent in the IT Training & Education workshop.  Understanding form creation can probably save you time learning LiveCycle Designer as well.
Suggested IT Training & Education Prerequisites:

• Acrobat 9: Forms - Optional prerequisite. Covers the first 3 sections of Acrobat 9 Pro: Creating Forms on lynda.com, including Form creation and distribution.

Users of Microsoft Office can take advantage of STEPS workshops on Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Outlook and Access.  However, these workshops are all taught in Office 2007 for Windows; and Office for the Macintosh (both the 2004 and 2008 versions) have a significantly different interface. Don’t worry though - users of Office 2008 for the Mac can find the training they need in Office 2008 through lynda.com. From now until December 20, 2009, students, faculty and staff in the IU community receive FREE access to lynda.com. (For more information and a link to lynda.com training, visit http://ittraining.iu.edu)

For users already familiar with Office for Mac, one tutorial on Lynda gives a comprehensive look at just the new features in the 2008 suite. Other topics of training include essential training for Word, PowerPoint and Excel as well as Entourage, the personal information manager. For a more detailed listing of titles included in the Word, Excel and PowerPoint tutorials in the lynda.com site read the rest of this article.

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IT Training and Education currently offers three workshops on Dreamweaver CS4:

1. Dreamweaver CS4: The Basics covers the Dreamweaver environment and building a publishing a simple web site using tables.
2. Dreamweaver CS4: Creating Websites with CSS concentrates on how to build a website using Cascading Style Sheets to control the layout.
3. Dreamweaver CS4: Navigation, Templates & Media Integration covers how to create pop-up menus for navigation, build Dreamweaver templates to simplify site maintenance, and include multimedia on your web sites.

While these workshops provide an excellent platform on which to start exploring web design and development using Dreamweaver, they are by no means exhaustive. And, there may be certain concepts (especially related to CSS) for which you'd like additional reinforcement. This is where lynda.com can come in. Remember that from now until Dec. 20, IU community members get FREE access to lynda.com. As of this writing, lynda.com has 8 Dreamweaver CS4 series, for a total of almost forty additional hours of training on Dreamweaver CS4. Awesome! And when we retire, we'll actually have time to watch all of it.
Here's a chart to help you narrow down which lynda.com Dreamweaver CS4 videos cover the topics you're interested in:

See a more detailed chart after the jump... (more...)

At IT Training & Education, we're always looking for ways to improve our STEPS curriculum.  Occasionally, even when we find a great topic to cover, we find that for whatever reason, either time or technical, we simply can't cover it in our workshops.  But now, IU students, faculty and staff have access to a wealth of lynda.com content for the fall semester, and lynda.com can cover some of these more specialized topics.

In this series of articles, we will explore some of these topics and point users to specific lynda.com courses that can enhance your skills after working through IT Training & Education workshops.

The first lynda.com workshop we will examine is Photoshop CS4 for Photographers (make sure you're logged into lynda.com through IT Training & Education to gain access).

In this workshop, professional photographer Chris Orwig takes us through Photoshop with the eye of a photographer. While many topics such as Curves, Levels, Layers and Masks will be familiar to participants who have taken Photoshop CS4: Retouching and Color Correction, Chris Orwig also covers things like monitor calibration, Camera RAW and printing images, which are all essential topics to a professional or aspiring professional photographer.

While the standard STEPS workshop is 3 hours in length, this lynda.com course includes almost 15 hours of content, covering many topics in greater depth than we have time for at IT Training & Education.

And the best part?  You can still ask questions relating to the topics covered of your IT Training & Education subject matter experts.  So you get the best of both worlds. In-depth training, taken at your own pace, along with an expert (or in this case, experts ) to answer your specific questions.

Photoshop CS4 for Photographers is not for beginners however, here are some IT Training & Education STEPS workshops you might want to take a look at before diving in:

IT Training & Education Recommended Prerequisites(or suggested skills):

• Photoshop CS4: The Basics - Basic interface and concepts
• Photoshop CS4: Restoring & Blending Images - Blending modes, Masks, and sharpening
• Photoshop CS4: Retouching & Color Correction - Curves, Levels, Layers and Channels

Exciting news from UITS IT Training & Education and Indiana University.  For the fall semester, IU students faculty and staff can access the in-depth training resources of lynda.com for free!

Lynda.com provides video courses on a vast array of software and subjects including Adobe and Microsoft applications, programming languages, 3D animation programs, web-based and multimedia technologies. These courses typically contain several hours of short videos covering both the basic and in-depth features of a program or technology. Another great aspect of these courses is that lynda.com stores older versions of their classes.  So if you still want to learn about Photoshop CS2, lynda.com has you covered.

But what if you like the STEPS workshops that IT Training & Education already offers?  Don't worry, those aren't going anywhere.  This announcement is all about Empowering People so you can choose the training method that best suits you. You can use them both to expand your skills -- whatever best fits your needs.

This program is only in effect for the Fall semester but IT Training will look to continue this program if there is a lot of interest. So take advantage now and check out all the training lynda.com has to offer. To find out more or to access lynda courses, go to:

http://ittraining.iu.edu/lynda