Week 10: muddy-clear-wow

This week we explored Microsoft Access.
I had never heard of this let alone used it. As Mr. Olson began to show us how this tool is used, I was unsure. It seemed similar to Excel at first, but then it was a whole world of computing!
My favorite part of this week was learning how to import the Excel spreadsheet and then making a report and or query about it.
Since, I'm a huge excel fan- I make an excel sheet for everything- this aspect was so exciting!
After being shown, the use of Access seems easy and fun!
Once you open Access you begin to make a new table or you can import the data from Excel.
After you have data, you can start a query under the create tab.
You can also make reports that can show specific desired information.
These tools can be helpful, not only to a teacher as in the example, to a business that wants to keep track of invoices, sales, employees, times, orders, and more!

Made by me! =]

Week 9: Clear

This week we learned about Moore's Law. This is an important concept in the computing world because it encourages growth. Growth, specifically at  doubling at every 18 months. Moore's theory was "faster, cheaper" computing.
A website that clearly defines this idea, visually is the Intel website.
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/silicon-innovations/moores-law-technology.html

Excel Project

This week we were able to learn more about Excel and varies functions that can be performed.  Simple functions of Excel are the varies formats for each cell. For example, when you type in 15% the cell automatically formats to percentage. The user can adjust the decimal point and how the percent will be used in the sheet.
As I worked through the project I reinforced the skills of adjusting the column and row width, inserting new columns, and formatting cells to reflect the correct data. A new aspect of Excel that I had been unaware before this lesson/project was the pivot tables. The pivot tables allow a user to compare data, find percentages throughout the data, and summarize by a sum, a count, an average and more.
An example of a pivot table would  be:

Here, my boss would be able to see the selected demographics- by age grouped into decades. Then she would be able to see that the average percent increase was almost ninety-one percent in females ages 20-29.
This can be useful in a business that would want to see average sales, or average time of work per worker, etc.
As you can see, the user can also make the table appealing by adding colors and fonts.

Extra Credit: Avatar

My avatar




I have created an avatar of myself with the Doppelme website. It was easy to use and was very quick. The experience was very cool. You register with your email address and then they send you a password. Once you are logged on you can access more features than just being on the site. That had many colors and accesories to choose from. I didn't use the accesories because I wanted my avatar to look business ready. So I put her in a colared shirt, with my favorite color of course. I would have liked to be able to change the shape of the face- like you can when you creat a Mii on the Wii.
I picked doppelme because it looked simple and the avatar didn't look to complicated.

Week 7: Presentation

This weeks project was to find a business appropriate message. Early this week I found a foundation that was geared to helping entrepreneurs. They have done awesome working, including sponsoring the Epcot Innoventions learning center in Disney World. They have donated 25 million dollars to 8 different universities of the course of time.
I decided to take one aspect of this company, its FastTrac program, and gear it to entrepreneurs who have businesses but don't know where to go from here.
I was able to critiques someone elses presentation along with my own. In this presentation, there were alot of words. I realized then that Don McMillan knew what he was talking about.
As the audience I was able to see some of the things a presenter might over look. Becoming the audience is a good way to avoid the "curse of knowledge" that the Heath brothers talk about in their book, Made to Stick.
While this presenters information was good and meaty, I was overwhelmed by the words and very little pictures.
I learned in my listening class last semester that humans can speak up to 100 words per minute while the brain has time to think of 500 words per minute. Pictures help to keep those words in the "oh and ah" area and out of  the "man I'm hungry area, I wonder if this meeting is gonna have snacks at the end, should I wear blue shoes or red shoe... oo presentation, right" area.  
Now that I have critiqued someone else and gained a little perspective, Ibegan to focus on my critique.
My presentation was perfect! -I WISH!
I began to see that I had to many words and only one or two pictures.
So I reworked it. I added a story to help with the emotional aspect of the presentation and added more pictures. Now, my audience can have a visual of what Im talking about.
I feel that my flow at first was skewed, I didnt have alot of detail of the main point I was making. So i had to add more information about the program.
I anticipated simple questions such as and?, why? What?
I direct my first question at my audience instead of raddling off facts.
I feel like the cookies would spark someones interest enough to listen at first and then stay for the rest of the story.
I feel im clear that im sharing about fastTrac growthventure.
Claims are validated from my story.
There is no clutter on my slides.


You can check out my video by clicking the link below!
Presentation 2012

Week 7: Clear

This week's discussion was about cloud computing. Cloud computing, along with other steps mangers can take, can decrease costs. Costs in electricity, training costs, software and hardware costs, etc.
The original cloud could probably be said to be the Internet. The basic idea of the cloud is that material used daily for a company, a class, or just personal use can be store outside of your computer and safely in another location; In the cloud!

http://lucaskrech.com/blog/index.php/2010/06/28/template-basics-clouds-and-skies/

There are three types of cloud computing:

PaaS, or Platform as a Service. This provides vendors with hardware and operating system. The benefits to this type is that the user is not responsible for the maintenance, upgrades or updates, or backups. Sometimes this type is referred to as Utility computing. Utility computing is basically the users software being run via the Internet.

DaaS, or Desktop as a Service. This provides an Operating system and apps. It is also scalable. which means, if you create one can ask the provider for 50 of the same thing the next day.

SaaS, or Software as a Service. This type provides everything. this is a per user per month subscription.

Cloud computing can be very beneficial to a business. It saves money and allows a company to run more apps or software than it could afford otherwise. Cloud computing isn't that new. We have used types of cloud computing when we used email. The data is stored somewhere else and doesn't take up memory on the device.

A manager does have to be cautious though. A company should never have so much of its data tied up into a program such as cloud computing that it would be devastating to either retrieve it or loss it all.

Week 6: Muddy

When we were discussing writing a program we touched on the programming language of C++ and C#.
I decided to do a little more research on what these two things meant. According to Msdn.microsoft.com, C++ was designed to be a low-level, platform nuetral, object-oriented programming language. Windows from the 1990s would be an example of this.
Now we have C#. this was created as a higher-level, component-oriented language.
There is not precise control like in C++ , it has a framework that helps the user focus on a larger picture. C++ allows the user to control everything, even the layout.
C# is also referred to as .NET on the msdn.mircrosoft.com website. An example of this would be Microsoft.




http://www.computingverticals.com/106/c-sharp-programming-basics-for-beginners/

According to Computingverticals.com, Java, C#, C++ have similar languages which makes them easy to use. C# was made for the gaps that existed between C++ and VB, another programming language. C# is suppose to be for intermediate level use and more user friendly than other languages. C# borrows keywords from C++ so transferring is easier and programming becomes easier for users of C++ going to C#.

Sources:

http://www.computingverticals.com/106/c-sharp-programming-basics-for-beginners/

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc301520.aspx