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HelpNet News No. 3, January 2001 ********NEXT HELPNET MEETING******** WHEN:
12:00 - 1:00, Thursday January 18 (Bring Your Lunch) ******************************** The folkschool-list has been fairly quiet over the holidays. Most of my own work with individual Helpnet members during the past month has been spent helping to make sure they can do basic but very important tasks -- reliable connections to the Internet, E-mail software that works, reliable data backup systems. I am struck every day by how immature, hard to use, and unreliable our current computer technology is. Imagine how we'd feel if our cars just stopped working at random moments while we were driving, and we had to pull over and call tech support to find out how to restart them. IN THIS ISSUE:
FINDING HELP FOR MICROSOFT OFFICE: Microsoft Office 97 and Office 2000 are the industry-standard office suites for word processing, spreadsheet, database and presentation software. They are very powerful, but also sometimes very frustrating to use. I'm far from expert at any of the Office programs, and I get stumped frequently. The good news is that there's nearly always a way to get an answer to an office question. I recently forwarded an issue of the "Woody's Office Watch For Mere Mortals" newsletter to this list. The newsletter gave directions on a whole bunch of ways to figure out problems with/questions about office. In order, they are:
This is pretty much what I do, although I've never gotten to step #8, and I often use the Microsoft knowledge base before looking in a book. You can find the full posting, with detailed instructions and URL's, in the Woody's Office Watch For Mere Mortals Archives, at: <http://www.woodyswatch.com/wowmm/archtemplate.asp?v2-n01> TALKING TO PEOPLE THROUGH YOUR COMPUTER: Paul Schroeder has convinced me to begin experimenting with "voice over IP" -- using the Internet to transmit voice communication over the Internet, so that you're basically using your computer over a telephone. So I went out and bought a $15 microphone headset, downloaded some free software, and on Saturday Paul and I made our first attempts to have a conversation, from my home to his office at the University. Our initial impression was that the quality and reliability of the both services we tried was not good enough to be worth the trouble. The problem may be that my 56K dial-up connection was too slow for this, since Paul has had good luck using AOL Instant Messanger to talk with another person at the Island Institute, where there was a high-speed connection at each end of the conversation. However, we came close enough to make me want to keep trying. The incentive here is cost. The latest version of AOL Instant Messenger (free download from <http://www.aol.com/aim/>) lets you talk for free with any "Buddy" who is on-line at the same time you are. (This is my first experience with instant mesaging, which my kids are expert at.) Net2Phone, like AIM, lets you make a PC-to-PC voice connection with anyone else who is on-line and running the Net2Phone software (free download from <http://www.net2phone.com>). In addition, you can use your computer to call any telephone number - the person on the other end doesn't need a computer, they just pick up the phone and talk. Calls to US numbers are free, international calls are as low as 7.9 cents/minute. Given our high cost of instate calls, I was intrigued. If anyone else is interested in exploring voice-over-IP with us, let me know. WEB AUTHORING EDUCATION: There is interest in having meetings/workshops on Web site design, and I've been pondering how best to do this. To me, the hardest part is not the technical aspects of how to put pages together (although I have lots and lots to learn here). What's really hard is thinking through how what you want to accomplish with a site, what type of interaction you want with site visitors, and how to put the content, site organization, and visuals together so that people will want to come and come back. I hope we can spend a little time talking about this on Thursday. Jon
HelpNet is a project of Pine Tree Folk School, and is co-sponsored by Bairnet (the Bangor Area Information Resources Network) and by the Peace and Justice Center of Eastern Maine.
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