Websites That Can Help Replace Programs

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Tech Tip, Websites

Now is a great time to explore new programs and apps that can help make your life better. I’m linking to an article from a couple of years ago about:

12 Powerful Websites

There are many downloaded program/apps that can make your life easier, but sometimes you just don’t want a program taking up space on your computer OR you want a free option. This blog posts slideshow suggests 12 websites that take the place of common programs.

These websites might be able to make your life and school work easier. But remember online options only work if you have a good internet connection. Try them out and let us know what you think!

Sarah Uthoff is a reference library at Kirkwood Community College. LIKE the Kirkwood Community College Library on Facebook and find links to Sarah all over the web at her About Me Profile.

 

Add Symbols to Office

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Symbols, Tech Tip

Microsoft Word is a very specific tool. It’s useful for reports, letters, etc. (See note) It’s fairly straightforward for these uses, but there might be useful features that you don’t know about. One of these is adding symbols to your Word document (or any of the other programs in the Microsoft Office Suite). How to Geek put together a useful how to on how to add musical notes to your text. The screen captures are very clear, but don’t limit yourself to that handful of music symbols. Take a little bit of time exploring, using the same instructions to find other symbols, and see what useful symbols you can add to your next paper, letter, or sign!

Note: While Word is very helpful for many functions making brochures is not its strength. We’ve been getting a lot of questions on these lately. Take our advice and unless your instructor specifically says you have to use a Word template for a brochure use Publisher or even PowerPoint before Word.

Sarah Uthoff is a reference library at Kirkwood Community College. LIKE the Kirkwood Community College Library on Facebook and find links to Sarah all over the web at her About Me Profile.

Transfer Large Files

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File Transfer, Tech Tip

Last year our AV services helped us produce a video that was a quick tour of the Cedar Rapids campus library. In order to get us the final version they used We Transfer. I hadn’t run into it before, but if what you need is to quickly and safely send a large file to someone this is a very handy to know about. If you want to know more check out this comparison with Dropbox.

https://wetransfer.com

For more options that don’t only transfer, but store and/or sync, check out this list from Cloudwards and  these  directions  from  PC  Magazine.

Sarah Uthoff is a reference library at Kirkwood Community College. LIKE the Kirkwood Community College Library on Facebook and find links to Sarah all over the web at her About Me Profile.

Google Tips and Tricks

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Google Search, Tech Tip

Feeling your research and search skills getting rusty over the summer? Take a little time off and play around with these suggestions. Bet you can’t do a barrel roll!

How To Be A Power User is from about two years ago and I think is the clearer how to of these two.

Get More Out of Google is a little more academic focused but covers much of the same material.

Sarah Uthoff is a reference library at Kirkwood Community College. LIKE the Kirkwood Community College Library on Facebook and find links to Sarah all over the web at her About Me Profile.

 

Disappearing Mozilla Toolbar

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Disappearing Menu Bar, Disappearing Toolbar, Firefox, Menu Bar, Mozilla, Tech Tip, Web Browser Settings

One of the all time most popular posts on this blog has been the directions on how to stop the toolbar from disappearing on PowerPoint, Word and Excel. I hope everyone will find this post about how to find the disappearing menu bar in Mozilla equally useful.

Directions

1. Open a window of the Mozilla browser
2. Click on 3 parallel lines in the top right hand corner near the red x that would shut the program. This is apparently known as a hamburger (top bun – meat patty – bottom bun).
3. A box will appear. Click on Customize at the very bottom of the box.
4. Click on Show/Hide Toolbars and Click on Menubar to make it appear. There should be a check in front of it.
5. Click on Exit Customization (a green box in the bottom right hand corner)
6. 
7. The menu commands (File, Edit, View, etc.) should now show at the top of the screen of your Mozilla browser.
8. The menu gives you lots more control over the browser including the ability to open private windows.

Find more detailed instructions including more screenshots, here:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/what-happened-to-the-file-edit-and-view-menus

Sarah Uthoff is a reference library at Kirkwood Community College. LIKE the Kirkwood Community College Library on Facebook and find links to Sarah all over the web at her About Me Profile.

Research Tip: Source Types in Ebsco

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EBSCO, EBSCOhost, Reach Tip, Tech Tip

You may think you know all there is to know about Ebsco, but we think we can still surprise you. Keep an eye on this blog for more tips.

How to find just a magazine or trade journal when you don’t want a scholarly journal

Quite often we help students with an assignment where they were looking for scholarly journals and we’ve defaulted to a check box with that filter in our limiters that appear on the left hand side of the results list once you complete your first search. This lets you adjust the results for things like being scholarly and the dates to search.

Check the box in front of Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals and almost all (sometimes another type of article will slip through) that you get will be scholarly articles. We’ve been talking about that for years through orientations.

However, you may not know how to do the opposite. How do you find just magazines when a scholarly article is not what you want? There is a quick way, but you may not have seen it before.

Source Types

Below the limiter box are other boxes you can open. This is where you find things like the Subjects you can click on to narrow down your results from an initial keyword search. But the box you want to open is called Source Types. It defaults to all type of resources, but lets you choose by checking or unchecking boxes what type of source you want searched. So while you can choose journals at this point to you can also limit your search to magazines, trade journals, or news sources if you prefer.

So the next time you think, I wish I didn’t have to wade through all these scholarly journals, now you don’t have to.

Sarah Uthoff is a reference library at Kirkwood Community College. LIKE the Kirkwood Community College Library on Facebook and find links to Sarah all over the web at her About Me Profile.

Student Tech Resources

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Eaglenet, Kirkwood Community College, Student Computers, Student Tech Resources, Tech Tip

Trying to use the student tech resources at Kirkwood? Then your first step should be right here!

Student Tech_Resources_FINAL_060215

Whether you want to know what Kirkwood computer programs do or you’re trouble shooting a problem, this handout tells you what to do next.

If you still have questions be sure to contact the student help desk located in the computer lab in Nielsen Hall. Stop by in person on call them at 398-7624.

Vital Statistics

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reference, research, Tech Tip, Vital Statistics

What it is and why to use it?

One of the mainstays of our reference collection is Vital Statistics of the United States: Births, Life Expectancy, Deaths, and Selected Health Data. A vital statistic is a record of birth, death, or marriage. Although in the genealogy world it is often used to reference information on a particular person, this source congregates and analyzes mass data for the entire country.

Want to know the rate of marriage in Iowa? The total number of divorces across the country in 2012? The current life expectancy in the US? (78.8 years FYI) The percent of babies born to non-married women? All of that and more is available for use in both informational and persuasive papers and speeches.

Where to find it

The last time we were going to re-order our paper version for reference we discovered that the Center for Disease Control had this information online for free. So if you are looking for charts of data of vital statistics (birth, death, and marriage, etc.) check out this link instead.

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss.htm

Caution

There is sometimes an expectation that the numbers will be up to the minute when they will often be two or three years behind. That is because the data the numbers are extracted from needs to be collected at the end of the year from state governments and other sources and then analyzed and imputed to the CDC’s various reports. This causes the delay, so don’t look for results from this year yourself or expect your students to find them.

Sarah Uthoff is a reference library at Kirkwood Community College. LIKE the Kirkwood Community College Library on Facebook and find links to Sarah all over the web at her About Me Profile.

How to Get Word to Look Normal

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Problem Opening Word Document, Tablet Friendly, Tech Tip, Word 2013

With Windows 8 and 8.1 Microsoft attempted to make one operating system and program suite that would be seamless across all platforms and devices. They made several major changes that they viewed as tablet friendly ignoring the inconvenience and headaches these changes would make to desktop and laptop users. They also made changes with that goal to Microsoft Office 2013. One of these changes was the introduction of a preliminary preview view to Word documents that you download.

When you are using Word 2013 and download a Word document instead of opening up to look like a normal Word document it automatically opens in a preview mode that looks like the screen capture below. This will only happen with files that have been sent as attachments. If you’re only using documents that you have saved on the computer, on flashdrives, etc. you won’t see this preview. It doesn’t matter what version of Word the document was created in.

This preview format really limits what you can do with the document. To get it to the normal fully opened version, in the left hand corner find three words – File – Tools – View.

Click on View. This will open a drop down menu. The top option is Edit. Click on this and it will open the normal way.

Good luck and if you have any further problems with opening an attached document in Word 2013, let us know.

Sarah Uthoff is a reference library at Kirkwood Community College. LIKE the Kirkwood Community College Library on Facebook and find links to Sarah all over the web at her About Me Profile.

Disappearing Toolbar 2013

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Disappearing Ribbon, Disappearing Toolbar, Microsoft Office 2013, PowerPoint, PowerPoint 2013, Tech Tip, Toolbar, Word, Word 2013

One of the all time most popular posts on this blog has been the directions on how to stop the toolbar from disappearing on PowerPoint, Word and Excel. Our computers were recently upgraded to Office 2013 and we discovered the new version has changed the way to fix it.

If you are looking for directions for an earlier version of Word or PowerPoint, click here:
https://kirkwoodlibrary.wordpress.com/2011/11/18/disappearing-toolbar

In PowerPoint, Word, or Excel 2013, when the toolbar disappears, it looks a little different than on the older versions of the program. Now the names of the tabs remain, it’s only the thick part of the ribbon ( the inch or so underneath the tab names with all the individual tools) that disappears. The names of the tabs remain so it’s a little easier to deal with, but it’s still annoying. In fact, it may be more annoying because it looks like you fixed it when it temporarily comes back when you click the tab you want, but it doesn’t hold.

To Really Fix It

1. Click on one of the tab names (Home, Insert, Design, etc.). It doesn’t matter which one.

2. This will temporarily restore the ribbon. It will hold longer than a drop down, but will disappear again shortly.

3. While the ribbon  is still visible, look at the top right hand corner of the toolbar close to where the red X which lets you close the program is. You’ll see a symbol of a person next to the name associated with the computer. Under this will be an empty column. At the bottom of the column you’ll see a grayed out icon of a pin.

4. Click on the pin and the ribbon should be restored.

5. If for some reason you want the ribbon to go away, do the same thing, but click on the < pointing upwards that shows when the ribbon is normal.

Find a more detailed description complete with screen captures, here:
http://www.word-2013-tutorials.com/word-2013-ribbon-disappears

Sarah Uthoff is a reference library at Kirkwood Community College. LIKE the Kirkwood Community College Library on Facebook and find links to Sarah all over the web at her About Me Profile.