Getting
Started with Windows 7 
Office
Fundamentals and File Management CGS 2531 Problem
Solving through Computer Software Spring 2013 Syllabus
Objective: The goal of this course is to make the student proficient in text editing and formatting, spreadsheet, presentation preparation along with gaining modern day computing skills (like html, web development, xml, blogging) in order to excel in a sophisticated business environment. This course will mostly focus on Microsoft technologies along with necessary introduction to other open source or proprietary competing software available.
Course Portal: http://www.pearsoncustom.com/fl/ufl_cgs2531/
Course Announcements Page and course home page: https://piazza.com/ufl/spring2013/cgs2531/home
You must monitor this page regularly, as all major course announcements will be posted only here, and NOT on Myitlab. You also required to sign up on Piazza to be able to communicate with the course staff (Course Coordinator, Instructors, and TAs) and other students. We restate once again: Because all kind of important information relevant to the course will be disseminated via Piazza only, it is imperative for you to sign up on piazza. If you have not yet signed up, you have already missed important information. In order to sign up please follow this link: https://piazza.com/ufl/spring2013/cgs2531/
Course Staff:
Office: E445, CISE Department
Email: msethi@cise.ufl.edu
TAs: (TBD)
TAs will hold office hours in the circa lab
Text/ Material: (Read this completely and carefully before purchasing!)
We will be using the following textbooks (apart from some freely available online material which is not covered in the books):
Exploring Office Vol. I by Grauer, et.al.
Exploring Office Vol. II by Grauer, et.al.
Blogging to Drive Business 2/E by Butow and Bollwitt
You do not need to buy any of these books separately! We will be using a customized textbook specially arranged with Pearson to keep the cost low. The customized textbook is only available as an ebook and comes as a part of the course material which you will need to buy here at the course portal link (http://www.pearsoncustom.com/fl/ufl_cgs2531). It is very important that you buy through this link only and NOT through myitlab.com. The link above gives you access to the ebook as well and is specially customized for UF students to keep the cost low. If you buy through myitlab.com, you will not get access to the ebook and the customized UF package! The cost of the package is $113.40. The ISBN of the package that you will purchase from here is 1256723479.
Note: You may also buy the above course
material from the UF bookstore. The cost is a slightly expensive at the
bookstore but the material is exactly the same as above. Fellowship students may
want to purchase the material at the bookstore. If you purchase from the
bookstore, you will get an access card which will have an access code written on
it. An access code will looks like this:
DSSXCA-FLVGF-PRBYS-ADNAU-HXABT-LAVTX. You will then need to register that
access code on the above
UF portal. The ISBN of the access code card available at bookstore is
9781256959
Again I am restating: Do NOT buy from myitlab.com. Only buy from the above UF portal or the bookstore. Last semester, several students made this mistake and did not get access to the ebook.
You must have access to the above online portal, in order to access assignments, course materials, exercises, exams etc. No Exceptions. To use the online portal site, you must be on a Windows XP or Windows 7 computer, running Internet Explorer 8 or 9. If you are using IE 10 on a windows 8 machine you would need to make a compatibility adjustment in your browser as listed here.
After purchasing access and creating login information for the course portal site, you will need to configure your machine as per the instructions given on the course portal site. These will also be explained on he first day of the class. If for any reason you are not able to configure your personal machine for this site, you can always go to the Circa labs to complete your assignements.
If you are Mac user, you should follow the instructions given here. Before following these instructions you must have purchased access throught Internet Explorer by going to a Windows machine.
Once you have purchased access and logged in to the online portal, you will then need to enroll in this course using this course ID: CRSABZ3-851663
Important Notes:
(1) This course is a significant revision over what has
been offered in the past and is geared towards a highly motivated audience.
Necessary math skills required for the course will be covered in the
lectures itself. The course is
self-contained but is more challenging and rigorous than the past offerings.
(2) This is not an online class. Exams will be both in
class as well as take home.
(3)
Lecture attendance is not required, but is strongly recommended. You will
do significant harm to your grade by missing classes as all the course material
is not covered in the textbook. In fact no textbook exists which can cover all
the material taught in the course. Hence keeping up with the fast pace of the
lectures is extremely important. Students taking this course as a means to get
an easy ’A’ should immediately drop it.
(4) There is no provision for missed HWs in this class.
Each missed HWs will fetch a grade of zero and will significantly bring your
course grade down (by about 4%).
(5) You cannot change your class section number in which
you are enrolled after the drop/add period.
(6) Students should enroll, using exactly the same name on
myitlab with which you are enrolled at UF. You cannot use a nickname or
different last name. Your name (First, middle, last) should exactly match with
the name you have on your UF gator one card.
(7) Enroll on Piazza! It’s free and a must to follow all
the announcements and time-sensitive information disseminated as the course
progresses. Piazza is also your newsgroup for this course and your only means of
communication with the course staff!
If you are not on Piazza, you will not be eligible for any re-grade
requests.
(10)
No extra credit homework will be assigned,
so make sure you do them ALL. Also,
no homework grades will be dropped.
(11) Sometimes Myitlab
accepts only a limited number of ways (or even ONE way) in which to accomplish
the task at hand, even if there are other ways to do it in Office 2010. It
is your responsibility to determine what that procedure is, before the deadline.
This means you must allocate enough time to get started on your homework, to get
stuck on a technical issue, and to need an extra day to go get some questions
answered, by email or during office hours.
(12) After submitting your homework, you are not done until you check that your grade is recorded accurately. You can find your grade in the folder “GRADES → HOMEWORK”. You MUST check that your grade is recorded properly, before the deadline. Students cannot claim later that they were unaware that their submission and grade had not been recorded by Myitlab.
(13) Assignments will be given weekly on myitlab. They will all be due at the end of the semester on the last day of the classes. However, the recommended due date will be a week after the assignment is given. There will be no penalty if you submit after the recommended due date but the TAs or the instructors will not help on problems being faced on assignments after the recommended dude dates. Also, we will not accept any regrade requests a week after the recomended due date even if it the software's fault.
Assessments:
Projects:
(20%) Two projects:
1.
Resume, Website and Blogging: (10%)
a.
Writing your resume in Word and converting it
directly to HTML and hosting it on your website at either plaza or
grove.ufl.edu.
b.
Writing your resume directly in HTML (with or
without using any WYSIWYG editor) and posting it on your website.
c.
Creating a webpage (anything with pictures) using
Google sites
d.
Blogging (to Blogger site) directly from
Microsoft Word 2010.
2.
PowerPoint and animation and screen casting (10%)
a.
Making some basic animation presentation in
PowerPoint, converting it into a movie using one of the tools discussed in class
and hosting the movie on your website. Also
posting the PPT out of which the video is made.
b.
Making a photo album in PowerPoint and making a
video out of it using screen casting and probably also using audio narration
explaining the photos.
Exams:
1. (MS Excel 20% , In class) Bring your laptops in class (mac or PC). Download large amount of XML formatted data provided from a website and import into excel and then perform some statistical calculations on the data. Convert it back into an HTML page directly using Excel. Submit the result , html file and the excel file for grading.
2. (MS Word 10%, Take home): Grader project and/or similar to assignment.
3.
(MS PowerPoint 10%, Take home): Grader project /
and or similar to assignment.
Course Outline:
Getting
Started with Windows 7
Office
Fundamentals and File Management
Excel:
Introduction
to Excel
Formulas
and Functions
Charts
Datasets
and Tables
Subtotals,
PivotTables, and PivotCharts
What-If
Analysis
Specialized
Functions
Multiple-Sheet
Workbook Management
Imports,
Web Queries, and XML
Collaboration
and Workbook Distribution
Templates,
Styles, and Macros
Word:
Introduction
to Word
Document
Presentation
Collaboration
and Research
Document
Productivity
Desktop
Publishing and Graphic Design
Time
Saving Tools
Document
Automation
Word
and the Internet
PowerPoint:
Introduction
to PowerPoint
Presentation
Development
Presentation
Design
PowerPoint
Rich Media Tools
Infographics
Interactivity
and Advanced Animation
Customization
Collaboration
and Distribution
Intro to Prezi.
Microsoft Office
365 and Office Webapps
Microsoft Office
on Demand
SkyDrive and integration with MS Office
How to use cloud to store, access and manage data through
different machines.
SkyDrive (covered above)
Dropbox (covered here and also versioning)
Google Drive (covered below in Google
technologies section)
Website development
Basic HTML and XML
How to Build a website, what is needed, file
server, how to register for a domain, ftp, etc.
How to import data from webpage to excel
using XML (also covered above in Excel 2010).
How to convert a word doc (for example a
resume) into a webpage
How to write your resume from scratch in HTML
Various HTML editors:
Microsoft
Expression Web (This is the WYSIWYG editor that we will be using, freely
available)
Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2010 Express can also
be used
Students will be free to use iWeb and/ or Dreamweaver also. (Dreamweaver is installed in Circa labs for UF students)
Various Google technologies:
Posting and editing video on YouTube
Google Drive and Google docs
How to build websites using Google Sites and other CMS
available:
Google Sites
Word press
Drupal / Joomla (probably if time permits: only intro of their existence,
not to be covered)
Blogging:
Word press
How to write a blog directly from Microsoft Word to one of the supported
blog websites:
SharePoint blog
Blogger
Word Press
Windows Live spaces etc.
Screen Casting
Social media and its importance: FaceBook, Twitter,
LinkedIn etc.
A
92-100
A-
90-91
B+
87-89
B
83-86
B-
80-82
C+
77-79
C 73-76
C- 70-72
D+ 67-69
D 63-66
D-
60-62 75 or
higher is required for a
E
0-59 grade
of S (S/U option)
A C- will not be a qualifying grade for critical tracking courses. In order to graduate, students must have an overall GPA and an upper-division GPA of 2.0 or better (C or better). Note: a C- average is equivalent to a GPA of 1.67, and therefore, it does not satisfy this graduation requirement. For more information on grades and grading policies, please visit: https://catalog.ufl.edu/ugrad/current/regulations/info/grades.aspx
Honesty
Policy:
All students admitted to the
University of Florida have signed a statement of academic honesty committing
themselves to be honest in all academic work and understanding that failure to
comply with this commitment will result in disciplinary action. This statement
is a reminder to uphold your obligation as a UF student and to be honest in all
work submitted and exams taken in this course and all others.
Students requesting classroom accommodation must first register with the Dean of Students Office. That office will provide the student with documentation that he/she must provide to the course instructor when requesting accommodation.
UF Counseling Services:
Resources are available on-campus for students having personal problems or
lacking clear career and academic goals.
The resources include:
-
University Counseling Center, 301 Peabody Hall, 392-1575, Personal and Career
Counseling.
-
SHCC
mental Health, Student Health Care Center, 392-1171, Personal and Counseling.
-
Center
for Sexual Assault/Abuse Recovery and Education (CARE), Student Health Care
Center, 392-1161, sexual assault counseling.
-
Career
Resource Center, Reitz Union, 392-1601, career development assistance and
counseling.
Software Use:
All faculty, staff and student of
the University are required and expected to obey the laws and legal agreements
governing software use. Failure to
do so can lead to monetary damages and/or criminal penalties for the individual
violator. Because such violations
are also against University policies and rules, disciplinary action will be
taken as appropriate. We, the
members of the University of Florida community, pledge to uphold ourselves and
our peers to the highest standards of honesty and integrity.
Contacting Us:
For
technical assistance with
myitlab,
contact Pearson by phone, email or chat session (contact information is on the
myitlab
site). For academic questions, contact your Instructor or a Course Support TA in
their office hours or by piazza.
Important: Please do not use Myitlab
messaging. Use piazza or our email
addresses (listed above) instead. We
will not be checking messages through Myitlab.
Also, please do not use or access any of UF’s Sakai or e-Learning
websites for this course. Whenever you send email to us, the email must have
“CGS-2531” as its subject. Don’t
forget to include your name and your section number.
Before emailing or asking questions, always read the syllabus, the
announcements, and the schedule. It
is quite possible that your question has already been answered in one of these
places. We will answer your
questions and resolve your issues the quickest, and most clearly, during office
hours. We receive many emails and
reply to them in their order of importance.
Normal response time is up to one business day.
a.
Can I use Office 2008 or office 2011 for the MAC?
Not directly with Myitlab.com, as mentioned above. For your own use, yes
(almost). Office 2008 (MAC) or 2011
(MAC) and Office 2010 (PC) are quite similar, but there are some subtle
incompatibilities. Our platform of
choice, for better or worse, is Windows and MS Office 2010. On exam projects, we
won’t make provisions for anything done differently on a MAC.
b.
Do I need to buy Office 2010? We recommend it, but
it’s not required (you can work in one of the CIRCA labs).
UF students can freely download Office 2010 at software.ufl.edu.
You can also purchase Office 2010 with your UF ID at the UF Hub for $15. More
details are here: http://software.ufl.edu/ms/msstudent.html
c.
Do I need to buy Windows 7?
We recommend it. If you are a MAC user, we recommend you install Windows
after installing Virtual Box.