 My name is Ken Mayer. I'll be your instructor for this course. Now I've been in the IT world for the last 30, maybe 31 years, and over that time I've had the opportunity to see a lot of applications watching them evolve. From the days of the monochrome screens, everything being DOS based or applications created on our Unix servers, working with dump terminals all the way of course as we continue to see applications evolve into what they are today. During that time I've also had the opportunity to do some teaching with a variety of different applications, a lot of Microsoft Office and other key vendors, so I'm hoping that with my experience in the use of applications, the teaching that I've done that I'll be able to bring some extra key points for you as far as helping you understand what key applications are. So in this module we're going to talk about application features. That's basically talking about those things that are in common with all applications, your commands, the way in which we manipulate windows, and the nice thing about that is consistency and that's very important. Most all applications that deal with any type of presentation are going to have options for different types of formatting, formatting of text or of numbers, making things bold, making them metallicized, changing formats of times, the way that you show time on a form. We're also going to look at the options of navigating through applications. Again the navigation are things like opening, closing files, exiting the application, resizing windows, and then we'll have a discussion about some of the multimedia options that we have. When we take a look at working with a document, if you can imagine I've got a large Word document that I'm using, and we start off with the typical text and writing a nice little paragraph. I'm not going to write a whole story for you while I'm talking about this, but sometimes we want to be able to take information from one document and maybe take like having a spreadsheet, which would be a little more like a table. So I'll make this pretty easy, and maybe it has some final summation of values, and we need to grab that information and want to move it over. One of the ways you could do it is just leave both windows open or memorize it and just retype that word sum over here, or we can start doing things like copy and paste. Now copy and paste we're going to look at or cut and paste are ways of being able to take a value from one application, or even from one part of an existing application and moving it to another one by just making it copy and then pasting it into a new location. Now certainly as you go through these courses you've seen probably a number of ways, but in many cases you're going to find some speed in the way in which you do the copy and paste, by perhaps avoiding having to go all the way up to the very top of the menu bar and finding the copy button, or having to right click and see this big list pop up and look for the word copy. Instead you can use hotkeys. The hotkeys are keyboard strokes that you use to be able to make the same common functions like copy, paste, save and cut. Now remember copy is leaving the original text or value or whatever you copied in the same spot it was always at, and pasting is putting it in a new place, and all of these functions start by holding down the control key. Now the control key, depending on your keyboard, I'm going to assume your keyboard is going to have the control key at the bottom left and right of your keyboard, same row as the spacebar, you keep that control key pressed down and for copy you would then hit the letter C. So you're still going to have to use your mouse to highlight whatever it is that you want, and once you've highlighted it you just hit the control C, move your mouse to the new location that you want to put it to, and then while holding the control key down still do the control V for paste. Now control S is a fast way to save what you're working on, again making it easier than having to maybe hit a file menu and look at a drop down box and finding the right option, and then the cut is the control X. Now I've probably mentioned this before but I'll mention it again, a lot of people say, okay the control X, I get that, that sounds like cutting something right, kind of like exit out, and control C, that sounds good for copy. So then people ask me why is it control V instead of control P, and by the way control P does work, that's a print function if you want to do a print, but the reason why is if you look at the keyboard, the keyboard shows the letters X, right, then next to it is the letter C, and so that sounded good for cut and copy, and then right next to it was the letter V, so in my opinion we kind of used something that doesn't sound like paste just because it was conveniently next to the cut and the copy. Now some of the other things that you see as far as commands that are in common is the ability for you to be able to show or hide some of your data, and spreadsheets are especially good for that, that you can basically collapse a couple of rows and basically hide them from people seeing them, but still showing them the value or the summation. Many times it might be that you're wanting to control the release of information or you might want to just consolidate the page, maybe it's a very long spreadsheet and you want to move as much onto one page as you can as far as what's visible, but without getting rid of the information. So again, this is all things that are in common with most of the applications that you're going to be using. Printing, remember? Control P, if you want to do that, plus the letter P. Now I put the plus sign, that doesn't mean you hit the plus sign, it's just adding it on it, meaning that you hit both at the same time. Printing of course, another common feature. By the way, one of the things that makes it so easy for people to learn applications was because of Windows. Microsoft came up with these common features, asked application developers to stick to those common features so that there is consistency. It's not just on Microsoft programs, but on so many other programs or applications that you might use. And in fact, for those companies who developed their own apps that didn't follow these common features, they often didn't get very popular because it was like you have to relearn something completely new. Now when you do a print, one of the things you're going to see is this print dialog box show up. The print dialog box, and this is if you use the print option that I'm talking about, the dialog box opens up and it gives you the opportunity to take a look at which printer you want to send this print job to. Now when you look at the printers, and you don't see it here because I'd have to scroll to the left, but I can't scroll on a picture, you would see usually a check box or a check mark next to what we call the default printer. In fact, let's make Ken's printer the default printer. So we use the print option if we want to either change the printer or change the option of printing everything to a certain range of pages or wanting to print to a file or make more than one copy or all of those things we use that as a feature rather than the quick print. The quick print basically doesn't give you this print dialog box. The quick print will just immediately go to the default printer and it will print all of your pages by one copy. So now I'm at the print. Here I get to select maybe a different source for doing my printing. Maybe I want to change the number of pages. Now if I don't want to print the entire document, you could put as it shows here a range of pages. You could say maybe page one through page ten, and that way it would print those eleven pages. Ten pages, I was thinking page zero to ten. So print those ten pages. Or if you're looking at that document or that spreadsheet and your mouse is selected on a certain page or has a certain set of data highlighted, the highlighted information would be the print selection, the stuff you highlight with the mouse. The page that you're on would be the current page. So that's again you're getting options about how you want to do these prints. Now some of the properties that you have as far as how to send your print jobs might change depending on the type of printer that you're using. Through this print capability, as far as this being in common to, as I said it again, common to all the applications, you can choose the number of copies that you want and it normally would pay, if you said pages one through ten, it would print page one through ten, let's say I said I wanted two copies, page one through ten, and then start over at one through ten again. You could also collate it where it would pay, if you said two copies, it would print page one twice, then page two twice, then page three twice. And again I think it kind of depends on the destination of the capabilities of the printer. Some of these machines are fantastic, they can collate it for you, they can bind it up, print them together, sort them out, all the kind of cool things that you can do. So you'll just want to make those choices based on the printer that you have. Some other common features that we see are editing functions. Now spell check is kind of fun. I purposely misspelled some words so you can see an example of what spell check was designed to do, which is to give you some sort of warning that it doesn't recognize that as a dictionary word, giving you the opportunity to not embarrass yourself by sending out some sort of document with horrendous spelling. Now in a large document, again if I have a large document with a lot of text in it, so I'll make it look like I've got a lot of text, and maybe I have multiple pages that we're dealing with and multiple pages of text, and I'm looking for a specific word. Well we do have the find function. Find, which you can by the way with a hotkey, control plus F, or depending on the application it may be under the edit menu item to be able to find. What that does is it brings up a little box at the top of your screen, and in that box you put in one or more characters of what you're looking for. So if you're looking for a specific name you could just type that in here, and once you do that it'll take you to the first instance of that match, highlight it for you, and then you often will have a next or previous option. I'll just put arrows. And the idea of that is that you click the next button and it'll go and find the next instance of that word. So finding is just speeding up the process of looking for specific information. Now let's say you have a common error, or let's say I'm writing a letter that says, Ken's going to be coming and teaching a class, but instead something happened to Ken and so now Jeff has to come. So what we could do is find all those instances of Ken and you could then delete that and rewrite the name Jeff, or you could use the replace option. Find and replace means find this word, then replace it with something else. Now I like to sometimes call that search and destroy. The reason I say that is if you're not careful with the way you do your finds, I don't want to say, let's try to make this look the right way. So if I had a letter that said it was to Ken and somewhere in the letter I have the word token, if you're not careful and you're wanting to replace all the Ken's with Jeff, you would end up with a result that would say to Jeff and then down here you'd have to Jeff because it found that pattern. So when you are doing finds, you have the ability to check and make sure that you're looking for the exact word match or a part of a word. Or maybe you want to make sure that it matches the case sensitivity. If you know that it's always going to be a capital K and the word Ken, you can add that and that way when you do a replace, especially because there is such a thing as a replace all, then you can hopefully have some assurance that it's going to damage other parts of your data that you're presenting or your words. If you did, of course, we always have the undo. The undo basically is designed to get rid of the last change that you made. Now a change could be that you just typed a new letter and instead of hitting the back arrow, you just hit the undo button and it would go away and just be gone. Or if you deleted a whole word and you didn't mean to delete that word, you could do undo. Depending on the application, you can do this undo, I think on some applications, up to 255 times. That's quite a number of things you can get rid of or changes that you made that you can undo the changes. But let's say you started doing undo and undo and undo and you all of a sudden said, oh, wait a second, I hit that too many times, then you can do a redo. That's basically changing your mind about the undo. Again, hot keys for this, control plus the letter Z is one that you'll use a lot. Reduce, we don't use it all that much, but yes, you'll see all sorts of shortcuts hopefully. Now, having gone through all of that, I think pretty much you get the idea that, like I said, with all of these applications that we have this ability. But one of the things I want to warn you is some versions of Microsoft Office, some of the older versions, once you hit the save button, then you can't undo anymore. You can undo from that point on for changes that you make, but it won't let you undo some of your changes. So you might want to make sure that you know how that feature works as far as setting it up. Okay, drag and drop, that's another way of course that we have of moving data around. That's a feature we'll see on almost every application. That's where you could highlight some area of text, put your mouse over it, leave what they call a primary button, which is usually the left button with your index finger. Keep that button pressed, move the mouse down to where you want to insert that text, let go with it, and boom, then you're done. Kind of a way of doing a cut and paste, but doing it with the mouse. Most of the applications that you work with are going to have the ability for you to set some preferences. Preferences could be that you prefer a certain font style and every time you open up a Microsoft Word, you want that to be the default font style. Or if you have a preference with the way you want a date or time to be formatted in a spreadsheet, then we can do that. If you make preferences you don't like, usually you have the option to go back to the defaults. We call them resets. So all of those are very important to make it more productive of an application for you by having the ability to set that up. I guess we could say in a way that you're creating customization. Another way of doing customization is through the creation of templates. And by a template what you can say is, alright, I have some preferences that I may use for form letters. Another set of preferences that I have for internal documents, internal memos. And so you could create these templates, customize each one of your choice of preferences, and use that as a starting page for any new documents that you make. And of course almost every one of the applications is going to have some method of supplying you help information. Usually you'll see it under the menu bar with the word help, and from there you usually have an index of help topics or the ability to search for certain keywords to help give you guidance about how certain features may work within that application. When we're selecting data, we're almost always using our pointer device, our mouse, but we don't have to. But often what we would do is put our mouse at the beginning of where we wanted to select data and then move that mouse to the end of the last of the selection, again with a click and drag, and what that would do is highlight all of the information that would be in between those areas. Now, many times you're thinking, well, I actually want to copy the entire document. I don't want just a piece of it, and you don't want to start this click and drag and have to scroll through multiple pages, so you have the ability to do what's called a select all. In this case, select all is a control plus the letter A, and that will select everything that's in that document. And then of course you could do your control C's and control V's or whatever else you need to do. So I've covered about how to select a section. Another way you could select a section is you could just click at the beginning and you'll get that blinking cursor. At least that's what I'm trying to make it look like. I can't make my lines blink, but that's a blinking cursor, which is basically your edit point, right, where you're going to be starting to type, and then holding the shift key down. So this is important. With the shift key plus your arrow keys, you can then move your arrow keys up, down, left or right. Again, so if I was wanting to select this one, I would start basically with clicking here to get my cursor. I would use the down arrow, down arrow, right, to get down to this line, and then use the right arrow to basically continue to highlight all the way to the end of where I wanted my selection. And then let go of the arrow keys, let go of the shift key, and you have that information highlighted. Another option that is common in many cases, especially in databases and spreadsheets and in some tables you might insert into your Word documents, is sorting. Sorting basically is your choice of sorting alphabetical, reverse alphabetical, numerical, right, 1 through 10, or I guess you could say lowest, highest, maybe I'll just write it that way. We'll just say from low to high, or from high to low, and it's just an easy way to help rearrange information in whatever format that was important for how you want to present it. And again, many of them, many applications like if it was a spreadsheet, and this is true of not just spreadsheets, this would be true of applications like Windows Explorer or File Explorer. When you see these column headers and we're presenting information, we can sometimes just click on the column header and that will automatically change the order that it was in, the sort order. And that makes it very easy rather than having to highlight a bunch of information and then try to find ways to sort. Formatting is something you're going to find in common with many applications. The idea behind the formatting is one of two things. Let's take text first, kind of what we call the font face. When we're making or typing in our regular text, you know, if I use what we used to do in programming classes, first program we made had to say hello world. If you wanted to make some of these things bold, then you could just highlight that particular word, click on something like this big B and that B would make the bold faced font. Now, of course, we also had the ability to use the I for italicized. I don't think I could draw italicized words very well. I could certainly do an underlined one by the AU. And if you could imagine, they have hot keys as well. Hot keys would all start with the control and if you're guessing, you're probably right B for bold, I for italicized and U for underlined. So that way you could highlight the text and just hit control B and you've got the bold taken care of. Now, another part of what we have to look at when we're creating text is also the paragraphs. The paragraphs you might almost say could be a part of a style, but we're going to talk about styles in just a little bit. The idea of the paragraphs is that some people may want a certain amount of indenting so that the first line is a little further in from the left margin than the next set of lines. And that's one style of setting up your paragraphs. Others may just want to have an extra large space in between the paragraphs and have them be uniform, at least in the length of the lines. And those are, again, some of the settings that we can use, plus talking about how much space between the lines that you want to be able to put in there. Now, that's mostly going to be affecting the way in which we do maybe a Word document. But if I was working with an Excel spreadsheet and we do use typing in paragraphs in many parts of our Excel spreadsheets, when you're working with a specific cell, and a cell, of course, would be that intersection of a column to a row number, when you are typing within that cell, you can also format what your text looks like. You can also choose how much space in between the times you hit the Enter keys. Of course, you actually have to hit Control Enter so that you don't go on to the next cell. But we have many of the same formatting options you'll find there as well. Now, on the styles, basically, the styles is a way that you're trying to basically get all of these formatting options. A lot of these options that I just talked about, and I didn't even get into being able to change the color of the font itself, it doesn't always have to be black, or the background behind the font doesn't always have to be white. And depending on the program, you may have some special types of effects with your font that you want to use. But you come up with all of these ideas of how you want your document or your tables that you insert into maybe a spreadsheet or table that you insert into your word processing. You format all of that information, whether it's any of those types of software, even presentations and publications, or any other application. And basically what you're trying to do is control the look and feel and how the display characteristics of the data would appear either on the screen or when printed or both. And it's a way of, I would like to say, it's just a way of saving your settings so that you can reuse those settings, especially if it's something that you like. Now when you're navigating your applications, you're going to have many common types of options. When I say navigating the applications, I'm talking about navigating the menus and the ribbons or toolbars inside of that application. So obviously, a spreadsheet's going to have a different set of tools and toolbars than a word processing program because in word processing, we're not doing mathematical calculations. I guess you could try to do a few, but what we're doing is creating a text document, different in the spreadsheet or a different inside of a database program. But what they have in common, as I was saying, is that they all have the ability for you to open a particular program or a set of data that you are working with, whether it's opening a database or opening a file or opening your spreadsheets, and of course they have the option for you to close that. They also have the options to save your changes or to do a save as. Now saving your changes, I think, is pretty intuitive. You've done some updates to that document, you've done updates to that spreadsheet, you save those changes, but sometimes you might want to have what I call kind of like a version. A version is your way of saying, okay, I liked my original document and I'm going to make some changes, but if I decide later I don't like my changes, I don't want to have to figure out what I did and change it back. So I could do a save as. A save as allows me to save that good document, the ones that I made changes with, and give it a different name so that I still have the original one I started with. So it's a very common type of method of being able to have different versions available to you. Of course, almost all of them have the option for you to click on File New. That's how I used to think of it because we always clicked on the File menu and these were the options were. So we'd click on New and then sometimes we're going to be asked, hey, we have some templates that we have already created that you might like to use for this new document. I mean, it could just be a blank document or it might be maybe you're going to create a new resume and we have some templates of a layout of what a resume should look like to make it easier for you. So you don't have to remember how to do the bullet points or how to do the indents or creating tables. Inside you have the option of changing the size of the windows. It is possible for you to have multiple documents open at the same time and so you want to be able to change that size of the windows so you can see all of the documents on your screen, usually done by moving your mouse to the border of one of the document windows and waiting for either a horizontal double headed arrow or a vertical double headed arrow and then from there just doing a click and drag in whichever direction you want to change the size. Don't forget if you want to change both the height and the width you could move to one of the corners and then you'll get a diagonal double headed arrow and you can click and drag from there. We also have the option to save our documents with specific views. If I don't want somebody to be able to look at my information I could save it as a read-only document or if I'm worried about the information or maybe especially if somebody has created some sort of script in the middle of my Word document and I'm thinking that that script could contain malicious code which it certainly could. I can open it up in safe mode. That means I don't want any of the scripts to run in the background. What kind of scripts am I talking about? Well, let's say you're working on a legal document. You have the ability to set up a paragraph header that keeps track of which article number or whatever the legal ease would be that shows you those Roman numerals and those little things are automatic. They're made by Microsoft to work for you that way. You could create your own and it's called creating a script so you could do that. That's some really advanced parts of the applications. Of course also the ability to zoom. You know, we type so at a level that we can read what we're typing and sometimes when we're done we're saying okay, what's it look like if I looked at the whole page? So you could zoom out. So basically shrink everything so you could see what the whole layout looks like or zoom in if you want to get more detail in some of the things like a presentation that you're working in. Multimedia kind of covers a lot of options whether it's pictures, music, video, combinations of all those types of things and so a lot of your software has the ability for you to be able to work with inserting that in. You know, I'm kind of using pictures, graphics if you would as an example because that's most often what we put inside the document meant to be printed on a piece of paper. And we have to worry about sometimes whether or not the pictures the right size will fit and you know, the orientation of the picture. So one of the things I thought I'd bring up as an example just some of the ideas of what I can do with some of the documents or pictures, graphics that you work with. This is just an example of Microsoft Office 2010 where I started with a very large picture and basically went over to the options to do cropping and of course just highlighted the area that I wanted to keep and again I could have done it by choosing the number of pixels where the top right corner to the bottom left corner but the click and drag was so much easier and then of course clicking OK to be able to say all right, I've got that part of the picture that I like. So resizing is different than cropping. I mean you might think that I resized the picture. I guess in a way I just took a piece of the picture when I cropped it. I didn't take and change the original size of this picture. Now the original size of the picture which could be related if you think to it about the file size. I mean some of these graphics can be huge amounts of storage but that's also because they have higher resolutions. They have the ability to, you know, as we talk about the quality of the camera and the picture can take that I might say, OK, I like the picture as a whole if I were to think of this entire picture but the size of this file is so big that many times I've opened up a picture where I'm looking at the number that says it's only like 40% of the zoom level and I'm still not able to see the whole picture because it's so big as far as the file. If I were to like hit this plus sign and zoom in I might see the actual detail of the boats over here at the harbor. I mean just again depends on the quality of the camera that took that picture. And so what you can do with resizing is basically say, look, this thing, if I printed it at its full size would probably take some sort of huge monstrous five foot page of paper. What I wanted to do is be at its 100% size that only be an 8 by 10. And so what you're basically doing is resizing the ability of how you can zoom in on the picture. Maybe there's a better way to say that. But I'm really trying to reduce the file size without reducing the quality. It's just a way of being able to say and often you have things that say, make this 50% of the size it was. So if you again blew it up to 100% and it was on a five foot page of paper like you're creating a wall painting or something, great, but if that's not what I want, I just wanted to fit in the corner of a page, I'm just going to reduce that file size so that it's already at its maximum value when you see it. Cropping, as I said, was just basically getting a piece of that picture. And also orientation. Sometimes a picture, when you see it, like sometimes you get a picture of a person, you see on a web page, and they're sideways because somebody held their camera and there's supposed to be a person with arms and legs there. And they held their camera in a vertical position so they could get a full body shot. But when you got the picture, everything's sideways. And so you could use sometimes keys like this just to say, hey, change that orientation. So now I have that picture where the person is standing upright the way I want them to be. And with all of that, once you save the file, you can then insert it into any application that supports multimedia, which will be most of everything of Microsoft Office. That can be also a copy-paste. You could, after you get the picture, right-click on it, choose a copy or Control-C, and then go to where in the Word document you want it to be. Do your Control-V or right-click and paste. And then your picture's going to be on that document and you can worry about how to arrange it at that time.