If you just don’t like the new Start Screen in PowerPoint 2013, and long for the days when PowerPoint started up with a plain, blank presentation there are a couple of things you can do about it. 1.  When you start PowerPoint 2013 and see the start screen, simply press escape and normal view will appear with a blank presentation loaded, just like the old days.  (The blank presentation is based on the minimalist default theme called Office). 2.  If you are one of those people who hates extra keystrokes you can change PowerPoint’s behavior permanently by clicking the File Tab, choosing...

As mentioned yesterday, the PowerPoint 2013 Start Screen has a search box that allows users to search thousands of templates and themes at office.com.  In this post I will describe how to create presentations from templates, how to pin templates to the Start Screen for later use, how to recognize and convert presentations to the new default 16:9 screen aspect ratio, and how to delete unwanted templates from your file system and get them to disappear from your start screen (not the same thing). Themes, Layouts and Templates First, let’s review some basic PowerPoint terminology.  Templates used to...

The first time you start PowerPoint 2013 you will see the Start Screen.  The Start Screen is divided into four main areas: 1.  A Recent area with a list of the files you have opened recently. The default number of files that will appear here is 25, but may be changed in the File > Options > Advanced > Display area.  Of course, the very first time you open PowerPoint the list will be empty, but it will populate over time. 2.  Beneath the Recent area is the Open Other Presentations area. Click this link in order to search your file systems, both local and cloud-based. Note that I have two...

We will be taking the Blackboard system offline from June 3-6 in order to update it to the latest service pack and do other end-of-semester maintenance.  When it comes back up, there will be several new or improved functional differences that David has blogged about in the past.  Since Dave is on a well-earned vacation now, I would like to review what I think are the highlights of the “new” Blackboard.  New and/or improved are the calendar tool, the discussion board (!), an inline grading tool, and a retention center to making it easy for professors to track and contact struggling...

If you are new to Office 2013, you will notice a new control button joining the familiar help, minimize, maximize and close buttons in the upper right of each Office program.  The new button is the Ribbon Display Options button. The functions of Help (F1 is still the help shortcut key), minimize, maximize/resize and close buttons have not changed and are familiar to all Windows users.  Since the ribbon is now the standard interface across all the Office apps, a more obvious, standardized way of controlling the appearance of the ribbon has been introduced.  Clicking the Ribbon Display Options button...

Too busy to read this (or any other ATRC blog post) now?  Own a Kindle or use a Kindle reading app?  We’ve got you covered. Even regular readers of our blog may be forgiven for not noticing, but it is now possible to send our blog posts directly to your Kindle or Kindle reading app.  This is Amazon’s answer to those read-it-later services like Instapaper, Pocket and Readability.  Just click the little Send to Kindle button at the bottom of any blog post, and whoosh, off it goes. Actually, the first time you click it you will be prompted to login to your Amazon account.  You will not be...

I had the opportunity to present a workshop today on the Google Art Project.  If you are not familiar with it, drop everything and pay attention.  This could change your life. The Google Art Project is a gathering of art collections from around the world; 151 institutions, over 9,000 artists, and over 43,000 art works, and counting.  The art works are presented in high definition photography, and many in gigapixel resolution.  To see the Art Project for yourself, go to www.googleartproject.com. The first thing that you will notice is that this is site looks VERY un-google-like.  A lot of thought has...

This week let’s take a look at one of the numerous question types available for use in a Blackboard test: Multiple Fill in the Blanks. As you’d expect from the name, this question type allows for a sentence with one or more “blanks” for the student to fill in. The tricks to using this question type are first to have the right type of question, and second to format the question properly. So what sort of question is “the right type” to use with multiple fill in the blanks? Naturally that’s a matter of opinion, but what I look for is a question that isn’t...

When it comes to news aggregators, iPad apps suffer from an embarrassment of riches.  There are several truly excellent aggregators, each with its own take on algorithmically generated news for you.  In this post I will take a look at the leaders and you can decide for yourself which, if any, you might wish to install.  I will not be covering stand-alone publishing enterprises, like the New York Times or Time Magazine apps, but rather meta-tools that aggregate articles from these and many other news sources.  I have stretched my definition to include Reuters and AP, which technically are news sources,...

This week I’d like to draw some attention to the Course Copy tool within Blackboard. True, y’all are pretty familiar with using that tool to duplicate materials into a new semester course, but there are some nuances to the course copy settings that you may be unaware of. First off, recall that you do want to start a course copy from the course with the material. In terms of “getting next semester ready” that means go into the OLD course. Under Packages & Utilities on the Control Panel you can go to the Course Copy tool. Here at Palomar we only allow one type of course copy...