Even though I am usually an “early adopter” and pride myself on keeping up with all the new devices on the market, I had never liked the idea that while you can do so many things on a smart phone, typically the phones are so small that you can’t really see what you are doing. When the sales person showed me the Samsung Galaxy Note II, I knew that this large mobile phone was perfect for me.

I have been using my Samsung now for approximately 3 months and I absolutely love it. I don’t know how I ever got along without it. No, it’s not a trendy iPhone, but the screen is large enough (5.5″) that I can actually read the email in my Inbox. I can follow the directions on my navigation app, read and edit important documents, and I even have enough screen space that I can surf the web and actually SEE what is there.

The Samsung Galaxy Note II is an Android device and so there are multitudes of apps available for use with it. As I mentioned earlier, I love the Navigation app and I use it all the time. The Samsung “Speak your destination” feature is fantastic, and it allows me to press a button, tell my smartphone where I want to go, and immediately see the route on my screen.

Since I don’t have time to explore the many applications that are available for my new phone, I thought it would be fun to put this topic out there so that you, the followers of our blog, could chime in and tell us about your favorite Android apps. Got one that you really like? Let us know. Add your comments below.

Let’s say that you are an administrative assistant and you need to be able to open your own personal Inbox and your organization’s Inbox, too, and you need to be able to switch back and forth between the two very quickly. In situations such as this, you could add a second Outlook profile to your computer, but then you would still have to open each account separately. A better option may be to add a second Inbox to your Outlook account.

To do this, follow the directions below:

1. Open the first Outlook account.

   

2. Click on the File tab to move to Backstage view.

   

3. Look on the left side of the screen, and verify that the Info button is selected.

   

4. From the middle panel, click on the Account Settings button. A drop-down menu appears.

   

5. From the drop-down menu, click on Account Settings… An Account Settings dialog box opens.

   

6. Click to select the name of the first Outlook account.

   

7. Click on the Change… link that is located just under the tabs. A Change Account dialog box appears.

   

8. Click on the More Settings… button in the bottom right corner. A Microsoft Exchange dialog box opens.

   

9. At the top of the dialog box, select the Advanced tab. Directly underneath the tabs, you see a section that will allow you to open additional mailboxes.

   

10. To continue, click on the Add button. An Add Mailbox dialog box appears.

    

11. Type in the name of the additional mailbox, and click the OK button.

    

12. The new mailbox should now be listed in the Mailboxes field at the top of the Microsoft Exchange dialog box.

    

13. Click the OK button.
14. Click the Next button in the bottom right corner of the Change Account dialog box. You see a congratulations message in the Change Account dialog box.

    

15. To continue, click the Finish button.
16. Click the Close button. The newly added Inbox should now be listed at the bottom of your folders list. You can easily move back and forth between the two by selecting the appropriate folder from the list.

    

There are four players available on lyndaCampus:  Flash, QuickTime Standard, QuickTime Custom, and Windows Media. You can choose a player (after you’ve logged in to lynda) by going to My Account and then Site Preferences. You’ll see a list of available players and their features. Just lick the radio button next to the player you want to use and click Update. 

Player preferences

You can also change player preferences from within the movie you’re watching by clicking Player Prefs in the lower right corner of the window. The movie will then reload using the new player.

Let’s look at what you can do with the different players.

Flash

With the flash player, you can maximize the movie’s view area, closed captions are available if you need them, and you can bookmark a movie or a spot on the movie’s timeline.

The Flash player does not give you the option to increase or decrease the speed of the movie, and when you click a timeline bookmark from the Bookmarks page, the play head will not automatically jump to the bookmarked spot.

QuickTime Standard

QuickTime Standard supports closed captioning, but none of the other features–so no bookmarks. QuickTime Standard is also not compatible with 64-bit operating systems; this makes it a poor choice for those of us who own a newer computer.

QuickTime Custom

With QuickTime Custom, you can click a timeline bookmark on the Bookmarks page and have the movie jump to that bookmark. This is the only player in which this feature works. You also get closed captioning, speed control, and bookmarks.  You can’t maximize the viewing area with this player.

Windows Media (this one’s kind of tricky)

Windows Media Player works on Windows computers only. It supports closed captioning, speed control, and bookmarks. lynda documentation says that you can’t maximize the view size in Windows Media, and that’s true if you’re using Firefox or Chrome. We at IT Training, however, discovered that if you”re using Internet Explorer 9 or above, maximize view size does work in Windows Media.

Speaking of Firefox and Chrome-Windows Media Player is not automatically installed on these browsers. If you haven’t already installed the plug-in for Windows Media on Firefox or Chrome,  follow these links to do so.

Windows Media Player for Firefox | Windows Media Player for Chrome

It’s easy to switch back and forth between players in lyndaCampus, so when you choose one you’re not really making a commitment.

*Note for iPad and iPhone users (This probably applies to other mobile devices as well.)

When you go to lyndaCampus using a browser on an iPad or iPhone (not the lynda app), you can choose either “high quality, for faster connection,” or “low quality, for slower connection.”

Now that you know which video player to use in lyndaCampus, go log in and start learning.

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When dealing with a magazine, you have to consider thickness of the finished product. This basically means that the cover of the magazine will be slightly wider than the inner pages to make up for the thickness of the contained pages. Since the page we already designed is 8.5” by 11” and it contains all of our ad guidelines, we know this is the size for our inner pages. Let’s define it as that by changing the name in the Pages Panel.

To change the name of the Master Page, in the Pages Panel, choose Master Options for “A-Master.”

In the Master Options dialogue box, under Name type “Inner Pages” (or whatever you want to name yours!) and hit OK. Now we know that this specific page layout is for the inner pages of the magazine. Let’s create the cover page master now.

There are a few ways to create additional master pages in the Pages Panel. One way is discussed here, and another way is by using the Create New Page button if you are in the Master Page section of the Pages Panel. But, for this exercise, we will use the drop down menu and select the New Master Option.

In the New Master dialogue box, we will name our new master page “Cover.” Before we hit OK, we want to define the dimensions differently because we have to make up for the thickness of the physical magazine. We will change the width from 8.5″ to 8.75”, adding an additional quarter of an inch for this purpose. Hit OK.

As you can see, we now have two Master pages, one for the cover and one for the inner pages.

Let’s say that we know every issue of the magazine is 36 pages with the cover. Let’s add those pages to our document so that we’ll always have the exact amount of pages needed when we open the template. To add the pages, in the Pages Panel drop-down menu, select Insert Pages.

From the Insert Pages dialogue box, type the number of pages to be insert (in this case, 35 because we already have a page in the document section). Make sure that After Pages is in the Insert field and choose Master: A-Inner Pages. Hit OK.

If I right-click on the Pages Panel and choose View → View Horizontally, I can see that I now have 36 pages in my document.

But there are still a couple of issues with this that need to be fixed before we save it. First, we want the first and last pages to be Cover pages, and secondly, we want the last page to be right hand facing, not left. If you think about how the magazine will open, it seems to make sense to have the last page sitting like the back of the cover.

To change the last page from left to right hand facing, make sure that Allow Document Pages to Shuffle is unchecked in the drop-down menu, then simply press and drag the page to the right until a small vertical line appears next to it and let go.

Unchecked!

To change the first and last pages to the Cover page size, press and drag the cover page from the Master Page section to the Document Page section atop the first, and then last page.

InDesign will tell you that the pages are different sizes, but we already knew that so click Use master page size.

Now that we have all of our pages set up, our guidelines and style in place, let’s save this as a template!

Awesome.

To save our file as a template, under File on the Menu Bar, choose Save As.

In the Save As dialogue box, be sure to designate the location where you want your template to exist, name it, and most importantly, under Format, choose InDesign Template.

And that is it! You have created a template!

If you need to make any changes to your template, you can always open up the file, make the needed adjustments and resave as a template. When using it as a template, be sure to save your file as an InDesign document as to not destroy your template.

Generally recurring published materials like magazines have such information as title, page number, and date as footer information. With our template, it just makes sense to add this now as opposed to adding it later when we actually use the template to put together an article or magazine.

Let’s start with the title. We’ll first want to place a guideline 1/8^th of an inch below the bottom page margin so that our footer isn’t right up against whatever content fills the page at a later time.

Make sure you are on the Master Page view and press and drag a guideline from the top ruler to an 1/8 of an inch below the bottom margin (red) guideline on your page. This time I don’t worry about keeping the guide inside the page or its color because I am actually only using this specific guideline once. However, you can do what you wish with your own template guidelines!

Next, we’ll grab the Type Tool and draw a text box along the new guideline and starting from the left margin line. It doesn’t matter how big the box is as long as the desire text fits within it.

Here I will type the word “Title” to represent the title of the Magazine. By default, the text appears in the font Minion Pro and size 12. I don’t much like this, so we’re going to format it differently. You can format your own however you want, but for this article, I want to change the font to Helvetica Neue Bold Condensed, all caps, size 8, and the color blue.

This looks nice and we want the rest of the text of our footer to be formatted just the same. Rather than going through the steps of formatting each piece of text individually, we can create a paragraph style and then simply apply that style to each piece of text.

To create a paragraph style based on the Title formatted text, select the text with the type tool. Then, open the Paragraph Styles panels from the dock, or find it under Type on the Menu Bar. With the text still selected, press the create new style button on the bottom of the Paragraph Styles Panel. A new style will appear in the list called Paragraph Style 1. To change the name, double click it and in the Paragraph Style Options dialogue box, type Footer where the default name exists.

Create new style. 

Rename.

Next, we’ll add the page number to the right side of the page and format it like the title by using the paragraph style we just created. Navigate to the right corner of the page and draw another text box. This time, instead of typing in the content, we will insert a special character (the page numeber) so that InDesign will automatically number our pages. To insert a page number, right-click the text box. Choose Insert Special Character, Markers, Current Page Number.

A capital letter will appear (in this case, an A). To format the text, select it with the text tool and click Footer in the Paragraph Panel. Then in the control panel, choose right align to align the page number to the right edge of the page.

Next, we’ll add the month and year to the second page in the spread (this is where you might add volume and issue number). We’ll do this in exactly the same way as we did the title and format it with the Paragraph Panel. We’ll add another page number (current page number again) to the second page as well.

Often times a magazine will employ a standard body text format. This means that all the body text in the magazine will be the same font, the same size and the same color. Sometimes magazine will employ the same standard header as well, or a number of any other elements. For this reason, we’ll make a standard body text for our template so that in the future when we use it to lay out articles, the body text style will already be there to use.

We’ll want to get a look at what the final version will appear like before we make it into a style, so we’ll start by drawing a text box on the page. It doesn’t matter where because, like the cyan guideline, this will not need to remain.

Fill the text box with Placeholder text, found under Type on the Menu Bar.

The text box is then filled with Latin nonsense (literally). We’ll select this text with the type tool and begin formatting it with the Control Panel. For my body text, I want the font to be Palatino Regular, the size to be 10 point with a 12 point lead, and the color to remain black.

I’ll add this style to my Paragraph Styles Panel by clicking on the create new style button and naming the new style Basic Body.

Now that I have the style, I can just delete the text box as well as the cyan guideline. To select the guideline, make sure your guides are not locked and select it with the selection tool then hit delete on your keyboard.

Save your progress! In the last part of this tutorial, we will cover creating an additional Master page, adding pages to your document and saving the document as a template.

Here we have an example of what can be accomplished. 

Designing layouts for a magazine can be tedious and time consuming without templates. Having to set up the parameters of the page for each article can take a lot of time. It only makes sense to create a basic page template that can be used as a base to every page design. In Part 1 of the three part series of designing templates in InDesign, we’ll cover creating and using guidelines.

For this tutorial I am using InDesign CS6 and a Mac, but you can use InDesign as old as CS4 and a PC for the same purposes.

There are a few things that need to be considered before starting on a template. In the example of a magazine, the first thing to be aware of is page size. We’ll consider that most magazines seem to be the standard letter size of 8.5” x 11.” This is a good place to start.

To begin. launch InDesign. Choose the standard letter size, Letter. InDesign automatically sets the page margins to 3p0, but we’ll be making our own margins, so set the page margins to zero.  Leave everything else on default and press Okay.

The first thing we’ll want to do is turn on the rulers, if they aren’t already on. Rulers can be found on the Menu Bar under View.

Next, just to make things easier in this case, we’ll change the rulers from Picas (default) to Inches. Right-click on the top ruler and choose Inches. Do the same with the side ruler.

Next, we’ll make our own margins. But, before we start drawing guidelines on our page, we’ll want to be sure that we draw them on our master page so we’ll be sure that every page in our document page has the same guidelines. To switch to the master page, open the Pages Panel from the dock, or find it on the Menu Bar under Window.

In the Pages Panel, the master page exists in the top section and the document page exists in the bottom section. Notice we are currently on the document page because in the Pages Panel, the document page is blue. We’ll want to navigate to the Master page by simply double-clicking on the Master Page icon.

Now we can start drawing our guidelines. To draw a guideline, you simply press and drag from the ruler and let go when you have reached the point at which you want the guide to exist. Press and drag guidelines .375 inch from each edge of the page.

Notice how the guideline is existing inside the parameters of the page. This will keep the guideline inside the page, which seems cleaner to me. If you have difficulty with lining up the guideline to exactly .375, you can always type the number in the x coordinate box (left hand corner) on the Control Panel, below the Menu Bar. For the right side of the page, you can type in 8.125 (this is 8.5 minus .375). The top guideline would be .375, but in the y coordinate box instead of the x. The bottom guideline would be 10.625. Look at that! We are using those math skills!

We’ve now got some perfect margins for our page! Let’s change the color of these guidelines so that when we start adding other guidelines we won’t be confused by cyan lines all over the place. Changing the color of a guideline is simple. You just need to select the guideline with the selection tool. If you can’t select the guideline, make sure to uncheck Lock Guides under View on the Menu Bar, Grids & Guides. Once the guidelines are select, find the option to change the color of the guidelines in Ruler Guides, under Layout on the Menu Bar.

Here we see the Ruler Guides dialogue box and the numerous colors InDesign allows us to assign to each guideline. Choose a color and select Okay. Deselect the guidelines on the page and see how the color has changed! We can now copy all the guidelines and paste the to the second page. Copying and pasting guides is just like copying and pasting an object. You just have to make sure you line them up just right.

Red guidelines!

Copy and Paste can be a little difficult with guidelines.

For our magazine spread, we know that occasionally part of the page will be allotted to advertisements. Sometimes the ads will take up a vertical part of the page and sometimes it will be horizontal. We better draw guides for both types so that when we use this later to layout text before our ads come in, we’ll know where to put it.

Our first guide needs to be 3.5 inches from the left edge of the page. This is half of the interior of the page.  We can use the Zero Point on the ruler to adjust the rulers so that they start measuring from inside the margins of our page.

Press and drag the Zero Point so that it lines up with the corner of the left margin, then press and drag a guideline to 3.5 inches on the page. Press and drag another guideline to 1/8^th of an inch to the right of the first guideline. This will be the margin between the ad space and the text space.

We can do the same with the second page. And, we can also change the color of these guidelines as well.

Next we’ll add the horizontal ad guidelines.

Now we have our template guidelines set up and ready to go! Go ahead and lock them under View, Grids & Guides, Lock Guides. In the next article, we’ll learn how to place footers like page numbers and dates, as well as creating a set of paragraph styles to be used with our template.

Welcome to lyndaCampus!

http://ittraining.iu.edu/lynda

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Note the first and last name columns below:

Suppose you would like to join these columns so that the full name will appear in a separate column.  To make the new column with the full name, insert the cursor in the third column and type the first and last name for Bud Roberts. Press ENTER and begin typing the second name. You will see a transparent menu with a preview of suggested names:

Press ENTER to finish the column. You can also use the Flash Fill command on the DATA tab of the Ribbon.  In this example, the First Name and Last Name columns do not have to be adjacent to each other, but the column using the Flash Fill must be next to one of these columns for Excel to recognize the correct pattern. This same technique works when separating text within columns:

The data must be entered consistently; for example, if some first names had a middle initial and some did not, you might get some unexpected results. If you did not want to use the Flash Fill, press the ESC key and keep typing to ignore the transparent drop-down list.

NOTE: Even though the “Convert Text to Columns Wizard” can still be used to separate text into columns, and the CONCATENATE function can be used to join text,  the Flash Fill method  is much quicker and avoids placing any formulas within the cells.

Changing the Office Theme

To change the Office background and Office theme for this computer only:

1. Switch to Backstage view in any Microsoft Office application by clicking the FILE tab on the Ribbon.
2. Click the Options command in the left pane. In General Options, in the “Personalize your copy of Microsoft Office” section, select the desired Office background or Office theme.

If you have a Microsoft Office 2013 account that you sign in to from any computer, you can change the Office theme for all of your Office programs from your account settings:

1. Switch to Backstage view by clicking the FILE tab on the Ribbon.
2. Click the Account command in the left pane.
3. Select a different Office Background and/or select a light or dark gray for the Office theme.

These background and theme changes will take effect on other computers that are connected to your account.

Renaming a Tab Label on the Ribbon

To rename a tab label on the Ribbon:

1. Right-click on one of the tab labels on the Ribbon and choose Customize the Ribbon….
2. In the right pane in the Main Tabs category, select a tab and choose Rename….
3. Type in the desired name and Click OK or press ENTER.
4. If you want to keep the default name but change it to a more conventional type of capitalization, add a space to the end of the default name.  Only the first letter will be capitalized.

NOTE: The FILE tab cannot be changed.