As you are working, remember to SAVE your work often (Ctrl + S) and UNDO (Ctrl + Z) if you make a mistake!

Hopefully you checked out the first set of instructions. (if not, go back and do part 1 first!) You should by now have:

• created your file
• named it Timetable
• saved it in either your OneDrive or Documents folder
• changed the layout of your paper so it is Landscape
• changed the margins so that they are Narrow
• inserted your table (11 x 9)
• merged your title row
• added the times and school days
• filled in the periods

Mine looks like this (based on the 605 schedule. Your periods may be different):

Now it’s time to start making things look a little better. Please only start to pretty things up AFTER you’ve filled in all of your information. For any class/project, the most important thing is to get some substance on your page/file. No matter how pretty a project looks, if there’s no decent information on the page/project, you’re not going to do well!

To change the look of your text, first you need to highlight it. Click and drag across to select, or double click to select a word, triple click to select a paragraph.

In the “Home” menu at the top of your screen, you will find a number of tools to change the look of your text.

The easiest thing that you can do to show that you care about how your work looks is to change the style of writing (typeface, usually called a “font.”) Never use the default font. It makes you look lazy! Always choose something that people can ACTUALLY READ. Some fancy fonts are way too hard to read. Why bother writing anything if nobody can read it? Also, don’t choose something that looks really boring and lifeless.

In general, I recommend NEVER using: Calibri (lazy), Times New Roman (so over done and so boring) or Comic Sans (it’s not cute anymore and hasn’t been for a very long time!)

You can also change the colour of your text. Again, make sure that your text is easy to read! A very light colour on a very dark background is a terrible idea. Same thing with dark on dark. You want HIGH CONTRAST, which is a big difference between light and dark (dark text on a light background or light text on a dark background.)

You may also choose to add emphasis to your text by using BOLD, ITALICS, OR UNDERLINING. DO NOT USE MORE THAN ONE! Choose!

SOMETIMES, text looks better in the middle of the page/cell. DO NOT OVERUSE this effect! When writing something for LA class, you may wish to center the TITLE, but DO NOT center everything!

In our case, having the text in your table centered actually looks pretty good, so feel free to center everything here.

DO NOT USE THE SPACEBAR to CENTER! Noooooooo! Don’t do it!

Instead, choose one of the paragraph layout options:

Now my text is starting to look a little better

You may notice that all of your text is lined up along the top edge of your cells, and that it looks bad. Well, you can center your text vertically as well!

 

You don’t even need to highlight your text, just put your cursor inside of a cell and then choose Layout under Table Tools

You’ll see a series of options. My favourite is to center things vertically and horizontally:

Ahhhhh… much better!

If you find that some text doesn’t quite fit inside of a cell properly, you can change the height of any row or the width of any column by putting your cursor right over top of one of the border lines. In this case, I’m going to choose the line on the far left and drag it left a little bit.

 

Take your time and make everything look nice. We’ll add some colour and shading and pictures in our next step!

 

 

 

 

 

You’ve used Microsoft Word many times to type up work, obviously, but did you know that you can create some pretty fun, colourful documents as well? Today we’ll get started creating a copy of your homeroom timetable that you can personalize and decorate however you like.

Here’s my sample. Your finished product should look something like this (click for a closer look):

The schedule for 603 looks like this. You will use this information to fill in your timetable, but you can decorate and change things as you like.

NOTE: You could, if you want, lay out your timetable so that it reads from top to bottom (like the timetables you may have seen in the past.) I’ll show you how to make one that looks like the timetable above (but oh so much nicer!), but if you want, you could do it something like this:

But I’ll show you the standard way. If you want to do one like the one above, you’ll just need to switch your rows and columns around.

You may either read the instructions below or watch the tutorial video below where I will demonstrate step by step. If you choose to watch the video, you NEED HEADPHONES.

Do not watch the entire video and expect to remember anything! Watch a minute or two until I do something, then pause the video, and go do that thing. Once you’ve completed that step, come back and watch a little more.

First, open Microsoft Word and create a new BLANK DOCUMENT

The first thing you should ALWAYS do with any work is to SAVE. Press the File menu at the top left of your screen or press Ctrl + S

 then

Name your file Timetable

Then click More save options

Press Browse to find the correct location for your file

The easiest and safest place to save your work is in your DOCUMENTS folder.

Then click Save

You’ll know it’s saved correctly when you see the new file name appear at the top of your page

The program will start to AutoSave for you if that switch is turned On, but you can also press the button next to that to save your work at any time

Now we can start to set up our page properly.

Clic on the Layout menu at the top of your screen

Then choose Orientation

And switch your page orientation to Landscape to turn your paper sideways so that it is wider than it is tall.

One more thing that really helps. Again, in the Layout menu at the top, choose Margins and change those to Narrow

Now that the page is set up, we can put something on it!

In the Insert menu at the top of the page, look for Table. Click that, then below the boxes that appear, choose Insert Table

You want your table to have 11 columns and 9 rows

Now make sure that you can see your whole page. At the top of your screen, choose View, then select One Page

If you have your cursor in or on your table on your page, you should see a box at the bottom right. You can click that and drag it out to expand your table to fill up the page.

Here’s what the whole page should look like:

BE CAREFUL when you pull that table down to stretch it that you DO NOT GO ONTO ANOTHER PAGE! We want this all to fit on one page, so don’t pull too far!

This is BAD:

This is GOOD:

You’ll notice on my sample that some of those boxes (called CELLS) are joined together to make one wide box/cell.

To do that, click in the top LEFT cell, then hold down shift, and click on the top RIGHT cell to select all of the cells in that row OR click inside the first one, HOLD DOWN YOUR MOUSE BUTTON and DRAG to the right. You’ll know you’ve got this right if that top row (and only that top row) turns grey:

Once you have those cells selected, you should see a menu section at the top called Table Design.

Click the Layout tab on that section, then find where it says Merge Cells

That button should join your top row cells and create one big wide cell. Now you can start filling in some of your cells, as you see below. Obviously you’ll put your name at the top instead of mine. Duh!

You may also choose to MERGE some of the periods that might be the same every day (optional!) So if you do the same thing every day during your morning break, maybe you just want one big cell instead of 6

 

There are two empty cells at the top left that I like to merge

NOTE: When you type in your name (or spell something wrong) you’ll see a red squiggly line underneath. That’s just Word checking your spelling as you go and letting you know that it doesn’t recognize a word. It doesn’t really know names, so often those will not be in the program’s dictionary. Often, though, it’ll alert you to the fact that you actually made a mistake (it happens!).

To check what the problem is, see a suggestion, and either change the spelling or ignore, RIGHT CLICK on the underlined word(s). In my case, I like to write my name like that, so I can just tell Word to ignore that weird word:

Sometimes, though, it’ll point out a mistake that you may not even realize that you made. Here’s one that happens a lot:

You can just click on the corrected spelling and the program will change the word and get rid of that red line

Fill in the rest of your periods! You may borrow a paper copy from the black binder at the front of the room if you need one or scroll up to the top of this page for a photo of your class’s schedule.

You may, if you wish, fill in the periods however you like! If you want your day full of eating. sleeping, and Fortnite, go right ahead! I do think that these are really helpful to put in your binder or in your locker, and I’ll be glad to print a copy for you to use if you want to make an accurate schedule.

The periods below are accurate for someone in 605 and are just an example to anyone in any other class. Don’t forget to use Bold, Italics, or Underlining to make things stand out:

 

SAVE YOUR WORK!

Press the File menu at the top left of your screen or the little save icon 

OR press Ctrl + S

 then

Whether you’re brand new to computers or a veteran, it’s good to go over some things that you should know and do before you get started working on your (super fun) projects.

First, log in. Your user name is: your first initial a dot, then your last name (some people add a number afterward)

ex: g.waters
or: g.waters2

Your password is: The first three letters of your first name (CAPITAL ON THE FIRST ONE ONLY) then the first three letters of your last name then the last 3 numbers of your student ID

ex: Geowat123

Remember to keep your log in SECRET! You do not want anyone logging in as you and messing up your work or doing something bad that you will get blamed for!

 

***************************************************************

For the next section, the video immediately below will show you everything that is written below that, so you can choose to either watch the video, read the instructions, or both!

Once you’re logged in, your desktop will look something like this:

You will see a couple of quick launch icons on the desktop and a Recycle Bin where files go when you delete them.

 

Down in the bottom right you’ll see a Start button

Clicking that gets you an area where you can open programs and sometimes see information like the weather:

Next to that is a search bar:

You can use this like Google (even though it launches another horrible search engine called Bing. It should be called Barf.)

Typing in a question or something like that will initiate an Internet search:

You can also ask it to do things like convert units for you:

And it will display the results for you:

This is a great way to get the answer to simple math questions and things like that!

You can also use this bar to launch programs. Type in the name of a program you want to open (like my favourite Internet browser, Firefox):

And it’ll give you a quick link to launch that program:

Beside that, you’ll see something called the Task Bar, which includes links to commonly used programs (and a couple of useless ones…)

   

That blue E launches a horrible browser that no sane person should ever use. I get tired of seeing it there, but you can remove it by RIGHT CLICKING on it. To RIGHT CLICK you either use a mouse and click the button on the right side OR tap on the track pad on your laptop with TWO FINGERS AT THE SAME TIME (NOT the same thing as a double click!)

When you RIGHT CLICK, you’ll get the name of the horrible program and the chance to Unpin it from the taskbar so you never have to see its ugly face again. Do it!

Next to that piece of junk is a program that we use A LOT! This program is called File Explorer and it helps you to locate, open, move, or rename files (or a whole bunch of other cool options!)

Opening up File Explorer will launch a window like this:

On the left, you will see a bunch of common locations. DOCUMENTS is one of only TWO safe places to save your files. If you save files into DOCUMENTS, you will be able to see them from any computer in the school:

Down in the bottom right corner there are two options for viewing your files, one is a list of details, like you see above. If you click the other one, you can see a “thumbnail” preview of the file:

Now those same files look like this. This allows us to know what a picture is of without opening it.

Next to that is another totally useless program:

Get rid of that one too!

In the bottom right corner you’ll see a few things as well.

You will see whether you’re connected to the Internet or not with the little wi-fi icon. Sometimes that gets turned off for some reason. If you can’t connect to the Internet, check to make sure that is turned on.

If you can’t connect to the Internet, you may be on Flight Mode for some reason. If that’s on, you can’t connect.

OR…

Sometimes Mr. Robson will catch you doing something you shouldn’t be doing on your computer (I see EVERYTHING!) and will turn off your Internet!

You can also see how good your battery is on the laptop. If they don’t get plugged in properly they can get low. You should notice before it dies!

 

There’s also a little arrow that you can click to Show hidden icons:

One of those icons connects you to OneDrive. OneDrive is where you will drop off your work to me and also a great place to store your files so that you can have access to them on ANY computer or device, even when you’re not at school.

See the OneDrive post for more information about how & why to use that application/site!

 

 

For this post, the video immediately below will show you everything that is written below that, so you can choose to either watch the video, read the instructions, or both!

There are 3 Internet Browsers on your computer that can connect you to websites, Firefox, Google Chrome, and Microsoft Edge (YUCK!)

In a previous assignment, you should have seen how to customize your Task Bar area (at the bottom of the screen) to remove that yucky browser (and the Microsoft Store, which you’ll never need.)

You should also have seen how to open a program. You can either use the Windows menu at the bottom left of your screen

Or use the search bar and type in the name of the browser you want. I use Firefox, so my demonstrations will focus on it. I recommend using it as well unless you’re used to Google Chrome. If you’re used to that other thing, CHANGE YOUR WAYS!

Once you have a browser open you’ll see it in your Task Bar. To get it to stay there (it will only “stick” on the computer you are using today, so if you switch computers, you may want to do this again), right click on the browser icon

And then choose Pin to taskbar

If you choose Firefox (good for you!) it will probably ask you if you want to make it your Default browser

Look for the Web browser section and click it, then click your chosen browser

That dumb Microsoft browser likes to make sure that you want to switch. Of course you do! Click Switch anyway

 

Visiting websites:

The top bar *can* be used to search for a site or topic, but if you know the address of a website, you can (and should) just type it in to go directly there.

Go to my site by typing in misterjrobson.com (you’ve already done this, obviously. Good job!)

Hit enter and you will be magically transported into Mr. Robson’s World

This is a site that you will need to visit a lot, so there are a couple of ways of getting here even more easily in the future

One is to add a Bookmark. You can click the little star to the right of the address bar to add a Bookmark. If the star is blue, you’ve already got one!

You can type in a custom name for the bookmark or just take whatever comes up

I like to make sure that my main Bookmarks go on my Bookmarks Toolbar

If you have that toolbar turned on, you’ll see a handy link to my site right in your browser window at all times. All you need to do is click it to be transported!

You can also edit or delete Bookmarks. I don’t use the Getting Started, so I like to right click on it and Delete

 

There are a few options that you can explore inside the “Hamburger” menu on the right hand side of your window (optoional!)

You can actually create a Firefox account so that you can save your preferences, like those bookmarks, and have them the same on every computer you use. I like this feature a lot.

You can also make sure that Firefox will start up exactly where you left off after you close the program by making sure that it will Restore previous session

We’ll talk more about this later, but you can also set where your Downloads go, or can choose to be asked every time:

 

 

For this post, the video immediately below will show you everything that is written below that, so you can choose to either watch the video, read the instructions, or both!

Click the little cloud to open the OneDrive app:

Click Sign in to, uh, sign in…

Sign in is your computer user name @sjasd.ca

ex:  

That should take you to another login page where you’ll put your password

On the next screen, you need to press Next

And then one more time to start to connect your computer to your online folder:

After that, there’s a little tour you can take if you want:

Or just Close the window:

Now you actually have a new folder on your computer where you can safely store your files AND back them up online automatically:

Now in your File Explorer window you’ll see a OneDrive folder:

Anything you put in that folder will be automatically uploaded online. You’ll know that it’s backed up when you see a green check mark on the file.

 

 

You’ve used Microsoft Word many times to type up work, obviously, but did you know that you can create some pretty fun, colourful documents as well? Today we’ll get started creating a copy of your homeroom timetable that you can personalize and decorate however you like.

Here’s my sample. Your finished product should look something like this (click for a closer look):

 

The schedule for 603 looks like this. You will use this information to fill in your timetable, but you can decorate and change things as you like.

NOTE: You could, if you want, lay out your timetable so that it reads from top to bottom (like the timetables you may have seen in the past.) I’ll show you how to make one that looks like the timetable above (but oh so much nicer!), but if you want, you could do it something like this:

But I’ll show you the standard way. If you want to do one like the one above, you’ll just need to switch your rows and columns around.

You may either read the instructions below or watch the tutorial video below where I will demonstrate step by step. If you choose to watch the video, you NEED HEADPHONES.

Do not watch the entire video and expect to remember anything! Watch a minute or two until I do something, then pause the video, and go do that thing. Once you’ve completed that step, come back and watch a little more.

First, open Microsoft Word and create a new BLANK DOCUMENT

The first thing you should ALWAYS do with any work is to SAVE. Press the File menu at the top left of your screen or press Ctrl + S

then

Always save your work in your DOCUMENTS folder. Call this document TIMETABLE

Now we can start to set up our page properly.

Clic on the Layout menu at the top of your screen

Then choose Orientation

And switch your page orientation to Landscape to turn your paper sideways so that it is wider than it is tall.

One more thing that really helps. Again, in the Layout menu at the top, choose Margins and change those to Narrow

Now that the page is set up, we can put something on it!

In the Insert menu at the top of the page, look for Table. Click that, then below the boxes that appear, choose Insert Table

You want your table to have 7 columns and 15 rows

Now make sure that you can see your whole page. At the top of your screen, choose View, then select One Page

If you have your cursor in or on your table on your page, you should see a box at the bottom right. You can click that and drag it out to expand your table to fill up the page.

Here’s what the whole page should look like:

You’ll notice on my sample that some of those boxes (called CELLS) are joined together to make one wide box/cell.

To do that, click in the top LEFT cell, then hold down shift, and click on the top RIGHT cell to select all of the cells in that row.

Once you have those cells selected, you should see a menu section at the top called Table Tools.

Click the Layout tab on that section, then find where it says Merge Cells

That button should join your top row cells and create one big wide cell. Now you can start filling in some of your cells, as you see below. Obviously you’ll put your name at the top instead of mine. Duh!