Randal C. Gibson's Blog, page 2
January 15, 2017
Keyboard Layout History
If you know how to touch-type and you have no finger, hand, or arm pain after typing for extended periods, then you can skip this post. If you do experience pain during or after typing, then you may want to explore using an ergonomic keyboard or a different keyboard layout. If you haven’t learned to touch-type yet, you owe it to yourself to at least consider learning on an ergonomic keyboard with a Dvorak keyboard layout.
More than 98% of people that type, use a QWERTY keyboard or typewriter. They are called QWERTY because that is the order of the first six keys in the top row of the alphabetical key section of the standard keyboard. Did you ever wonder why the keys are in that particular arrangement?
Let’s go back to the year 1850. This was not the stone age. The population of the U.S. was 23 million and steam power had just been applied to printing presses, so there were millions of books and newspapers with easy to read text. But there were no computers and no typewriters. Imagine millions of people manually writing things down. If just a small percentage of that written material was unreadable, that amounted to a gigantic waste of time for businesses that had to have legible records. That led to the invention of typewriters - machines that allowed people to create documents that were easily and consistently readable.
There is much debate about why early typewriters were developed with key layouts that ended up having the letters QWERTY at the beginning of the top row. Some mechanical machines were designed with the letters in an alphabetical order: ABCDE… There are at least three theories as to why the original layouts were changed. The original, and most popular, was that the mechanical keys were put as close as possible to each other to save space and that when two keys right next to each other were typed in sequence too quickly, the adjacent key elements would hit each other and jam up, or at least slow down the typist. To fix that, the order of the keys had to be rearranged to slow down the users. A later adjustment to that theory, stated that the rearrangement of the layout was needed to allow the user to type as quickly as possible, without jamming the mechanical elements. I’m sure their sales pitch was, “this new layout design allows the typist to produce perfect, readable documents faster than ever before humanly possible.” Finally, people who didn’t want anybody to think there was any reason to slow down typists, spread the idea that the changes were made to accommodate telegraph operators.
One of the early typewriter manufacturers patented an early QWERTY layout in 1878 and then made a deal with the gun maker Remington for mass production. By 1890, there were more than 100,000 QWERTY typewriters in use. The layout became a real standard in 1893 when the five largest typewriter manufacturers merged to form the Union Typewriter Company and QWERTY became their default key layout.
In the early 1900s, a professor of education named August Dvorak served as an advisor to a woman writing her master’s thesis on typing errors. Dvorak studied the QWERTY keyboard layout to see if it was the optimum design to reduce typing errors. Dvorak got his brother-in-law, another professor of education, to assist him in his research. They attended seminars on the science of motion, reviewed slow-motion films of typists, studied the physiology of the human hand, and researched the most used letters and letter combinations in the English language. They continued this work for at least 17 years, trying to design a key layout that would minimize the problems of the QWERTY layout. They discovered that over 3000 English language words are typed by the left hand alone and that 300 words are typed using only the right hand when using the QWERTY layout. Obviously, the optimum typing pattern for each word is to type one letter using one hand, the next letter using the other hand, and to then alternate hands for the entire word. That can’t be achieved for every word, of course, but the layout that has the most words that alternate hands and has the least amount of finger travel, would be the most efficient layout for typing speed and for lessening finger, hand, and arm strain. Another bad statistic for the QWERTY layout is the fact that only 32% of all English language typing is done on the “home row.” That’s the middle row of the three rows of alphabetical keys on the modern keyboard. There are eight keys that your eight fingers rest on and there are two more keys (one to the right of your left index finger and one to the left of your right index finger,) in this home row. You obviously want as many words as possible, typed using only those eight keys where your fingers rest.
I’ve got more to come in future posts, but I want to end this post with three links. It is so hard to find information on the Dvorak layout that I will include more links in future posts, but I will start out here with the usual starting point – Wikipedia. You should start with a general background article about keyboard layouts:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboar...
Then the Wikipedia article about the Dvorak layout:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_...
Finally, a very detailed article with the subtitle: “Forty Years of Frustration.”:
http://infohost.nmt.edu/~shipman/ergo...
Let me know if you find any of these links informative.
More than 98% of people that type, use a QWERTY keyboard or typewriter. They are called QWERTY because that is the order of the first six keys in the top row of the alphabetical key section of the standard keyboard. Did you ever wonder why the keys are in that particular arrangement?
Let’s go back to the year 1850. This was not the stone age. The population of the U.S. was 23 million and steam power had just been applied to printing presses, so there were millions of books and newspapers with easy to read text. But there were no computers and no typewriters. Imagine millions of people manually writing things down. If just a small percentage of that written material was unreadable, that amounted to a gigantic waste of time for businesses that had to have legible records. That led to the invention of typewriters - machines that allowed people to create documents that were easily and consistently readable.
There is much debate about why early typewriters were developed with key layouts that ended up having the letters QWERTY at the beginning of the top row. Some mechanical machines were designed with the letters in an alphabetical order: ABCDE… There are at least three theories as to why the original layouts were changed. The original, and most popular, was that the mechanical keys were put as close as possible to each other to save space and that when two keys right next to each other were typed in sequence too quickly, the adjacent key elements would hit each other and jam up, or at least slow down the typist. To fix that, the order of the keys had to be rearranged to slow down the users. A later adjustment to that theory, stated that the rearrangement of the layout was needed to allow the user to type as quickly as possible, without jamming the mechanical elements. I’m sure their sales pitch was, “this new layout design allows the typist to produce perfect, readable documents faster than ever before humanly possible.” Finally, people who didn’t want anybody to think there was any reason to slow down typists, spread the idea that the changes were made to accommodate telegraph operators.
One of the early typewriter manufacturers patented an early QWERTY layout in 1878 and then made a deal with the gun maker Remington for mass production. By 1890, there were more than 100,000 QWERTY typewriters in use. The layout became a real standard in 1893 when the five largest typewriter manufacturers merged to form the Union Typewriter Company and QWERTY became their default key layout.
In the early 1900s, a professor of education named August Dvorak served as an advisor to a woman writing her master’s thesis on typing errors. Dvorak studied the QWERTY keyboard layout to see if it was the optimum design to reduce typing errors. Dvorak got his brother-in-law, another professor of education, to assist him in his research. They attended seminars on the science of motion, reviewed slow-motion films of typists, studied the physiology of the human hand, and researched the most used letters and letter combinations in the English language. They continued this work for at least 17 years, trying to design a key layout that would minimize the problems of the QWERTY layout. They discovered that over 3000 English language words are typed by the left hand alone and that 300 words are typed using only the right hand when using the QWERTY layout. Obviously, the optimum typing pattern for each word is to type one letter using one hand, the next letter using the other hand, and to then alternate hands for the entire word. That can’t be achieved for every word, of course, but the layout that has the most words that alternate hands and has the least amount of finger travel, would be the most efficient layout for typing speed and for lessening finger, hand, and arm strain. Another bad statistic for the QWERTY layout is the fact that only 32% of all English language typing is done on the “home row.” That’s the middle row of the three rows of alphabetical keys on the modern keyboard. There are eight keys that your eight fingers rest on and there are two more keys (one to the right of your left index finger and one to the left of your right index finger,) in this home row. You obviously want as many words as possible, typed using only those eight keys where your fingers rest.
I’ve got more to come in future posts, but I want to end this post with three links. It is so hard to find information on the Dvorak layout that I will include more links in future posts, but I will start out here with the usual starting point – Wikipedia. You should start with a general background article about keyboard layouts:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboar...
Then the Wikipedia article about the Dvorak layout:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_...
Finally, a very detailed article with the subtitle: “Forty Years of Frustration.”:
http://infohost.nmt.edu/~shipman/ergo...
Let me know if you find any of these links informative.
January 6, 2017
Hyperlinks
My first book is about music and high-resolution digital audio files. It is a non-fiction book about new tech that a lot of people don’t know much about. In the old days (20 years ago,) people who wrote books about new science or tech subjects, would have to include a lot of footnotes and material in parentheses. Having too much of either of those can detract from the reading experience. Of course, textbooks and reference books would be criticized for not having citations and sources for any non-original content.
A perfect book would have nothing that distracts the reader from the reading process. With a fiction book, you shouldn’t have any distractions like footnotes or external hyperlinks. With a non-fiction book that has a lot of new terms, authors used to have a glossary at the beginning or the end of the book. With the Kindle devices and the Kindle Reader apps, you can tap on or select a word and an internal dictionary will be accessed to display the meaning of that word. But what about multi-word terms that aren’t in the device or program’s dictionary? In my book I included this text: “He had to agree to encode all the songs with Digital Rights Management copy protection to try to cut down on “illegal” file sharing…” I included the text following the term to explain what DRM is, but I didn’t want to have an entire chapter discussing the ramifications of DRM. Why would I duplicate any of the material that is already available on a site like Wikipedia? Their article on DRM talks about “DRM and music”, “Laws regarding DRM”, “Opposition to DRM”, Shortcomings, Alternatives, Crowdfunding, “Related concepts”, Lawsuits, and “Further reading.” That is a lot of interesting and important information, but my book is about music – not copy protection. But why not provide an easy link to all that information?
What about product links? Everybody now knows that you can access most companies web sites by typing in the company name followed by “.com”. But some companies end up using a different name or a different extension like .org, .info, .shop, .cloud, etc. One of the products I write about in my book is sold by a company called Novation. If you type novation.com you’ll get an empty website. For the company I wrote about, you have to type novationmusic.com. Don’t make your reader google that, just provide the link. For some companies, I’ll include two links. For Spotify, I included a link to spotify.com and to the article about Spotify on Wikipedia. But that was just the first two references to Spotify. The rest of the times I use the word Spotify in my book, they are not hyperlinks.
Of course, you don’t want to overuse hyperlinks. A large percentage of the words in your book might have articles describing them on Wikipedia. I would only use hyperlinks for new terms or companies or products that are unique or essential to the main subject of your book. The Kindle Publishing Guidelines publication says: “External links within Kindle books should be present only if they directly enhance the reader experience and the content of the title as determined by Amazon.”
I want to cater to readers who like access to more information and to readers that want to read straight through a book without interruptions. And, since Kindle Reader devices have a terrible web browser that won’t play videos, the first chapter of my book is entitled “How to Use This Book.” I suggest to Kindle device readers that they should read the book through once on the Kindle and then skim through the book on a tablet or computer, to access the links they are interested in.
None of the links in my book are “affiliate” or “associates” links where you make a small percentage of any sale that results from your reader using that link to purchase products. The research I have done to find out if that is allowed, has been inconclusive.
A perfect book would have nothing that distracts the reader from the reading process. With a fiction book, you shouldn’t have any distractions like footnotes or external hyperlinks. With a non-fiction book that has a lot of new terms, authors used to have a glossary at the beginning or the end of the book. With the Kindle devices and the Kindle Reader apps, you can tap on or select a word and an internal dictionary will be accessed to display the meaning of that word. But what about multi-word terms that aren’t in the device or program’s dictionary? In my book I included this text: “He had to agree to encode all the songs with Digital Rights Management copy protection to try to cut down on “illegal” file sharing…” I included the text following the term to explain what DRM is, but I didn’t want to have an entire chapter discussing the ramifications of DRM. Why would I duplicate any of the material that is already available on a site like Wikipedia? Their article on DRM talks about “DRM and music”, “Laws regarding DRM”, “Opposition to DRM”, Shortcomings, Alternatives, Crowdfunding, “Related concepts”, Lawsuits, and “Further reading.” That is a lot of interesting and important information, but my book is about music – not copy protection. But why not provide an easy link to all that information?
What about product links? Everybody now knows that you can access most companies web sites by typing in the company name followed by “.com”. But some companies end up using a different name or a different extension like .org, .info, .shop, .cloud, etc. One of the products I write about in my book is sold by a company called Novation. If you type novation.com you’ll get an empty website. For the company I wrote about, you have to type novationmusic.com. Don’t make your reader google that, just provide the link. For some companies, I’ll include two links. For Spotify, I included a link to spotify.com and to the article about Spotify on Wikipedia. But that was just the first two references to Spotify. The rest of the times I use the word Spotify in my book, they are not hyperlinks.
Of course, you don’t want to overuse hyperlinks. A large percentage of the words in your book might have articles describing them on Wikipedia. I would only use hyperlinks for new terms or companies or products that are unique or essential to the main subject of your book. The Kindle Publishing Guidelines publication says: “External links within Kindle books should be present only if they directly enhance the reader experience and the content of the title as determined by Amazon.”
I want to cater to readers who like access to more information and to readers that want to read straight through a book without interruptions. And, since Kindle Reader devices have a terrible web browser that won’t play videos, the first chapter of my book is entitled “How to Use This Book.” I suggest to Kindle device readers that they should read the book through once on the Kindle and then skim through the book on a tablet or computer, to access the links they are interested in.
None of the links in my book are “affiliate” or “associates” links where you make a small percentage of any sale that results from your reader using that link to purchase products. The research I have done to find out if that is allowed, has been inconclusive.
January 1, 2017
Quick Access Toolbar
This is a tip that will work with all your Microsoft Office programs. The very top line of your Office program window includes the Quick Access Toolbar, the name of the file you are working on, the name of the program you are using (Word, Excel, etc.,) your user name, a button used to show your Ribbon Display Options, and your other “window” controls (Minimize, Maximize, and Close.) If you click on your Ribbon Display Options button, you will have three options: Auto-hide Ribbon, Show Tabs, and Show Tabs and Commands. As long as your display resolution is not smaller than 1920 x 1080, you should use the Show Tabs and Commands option. That way, all your Commands and the chosen Command Ribbon, are always visible.
The second line from the top of your program window, starts with the Tab labels. For Word 2016, the first four Tabs are File, Home, Insert, and Design. When you click on any Tab after File, its associated Commands are listed right below in the Command Ribbon. The Home Tab lists the most used Commands. But if you find yourself constantly changing to a different Tab and then back to Home, you can change the Quick Access Toolbar to save time. At the right end of those Quick Access Tools is a small button that is a drop-down box activator. Click on that button and you will see a box titled “Customize Quick Access Toolbar.” Below that is a list of standard commands, some of which have checkmarks to the left of them. Those are some of the commands that are currently displayed to the left. Just below the standard commands is the line “More Commands…”. Click on that and you will see a box that will allow you to Customize the Quick Access Toolbar. The box on the right shows the current toolbar commands and the box on the left can show all the commands available. Let’s say you want to add the command to Insert a Page Break. You may already know that the Page Break command is on the Insert Tab. Notice now that above the box on the left is a drop-down option to select “Choose commands from:”. Click on the drop-down button and select “Insert Tab”. That will show all the commands that are in the Insert Command Ribbon. Scroll down to “Insert Page Break” and click on it. Then click on the “Add >>” button between the two boxes. Then you can use the up and down arrow buttons to the right to move the “Insert Page Break” command to where you want it in the Quick Access Toolbar.
On my toolbar, I’ve also added “Update Table of Contents” from the References Tab. Click OK when the Toolbar is the way you want it. The Update TOC command is useful because for some reason, when you add a new Heading 1 title, it is automatically added to your navigation pane but not to your TOC. I know in my previous post, I called it an automatic TOC, I guess it’s really just “easily updated semi-automatic.”
The second line from the top of your program window, starts with the Tab labels. For Word 2016, the first four Tabs are File, Home, Insert, and Design. When you click on any Tab after File, its associated Commands are listed right below in the Command Ribbon. The Home Tab lists the most used Commands. But if you find yourself constantly changing to a different Tab and then back to Home, you can change the Quick Access Toolbar to save time. At the right end of those Quick Access Tools is a small button that is a drop-down box activator. Click on that button and you will see a box titled “Customize Quick Access Toolbar.” Below that is a list of standard commands, some of which have checkmarks to the left of them. Those are some of the commands that are currently displayed to the left. Just below the standard commands is the line “More Commands…”. Click on that and you will see a box that will allow you to Customize the Quick Access Toolbar. The box on the right shows the current toolbar commands and the box on the left can show all the commands available. Let’s say you want to add the command to Insert a Page Break. You may already know that the Page Break command is on the Insert Tab. Notice now that above the box on the left is a drop-down option to select “Choose commands from:”. Click on the drop-down button and select “Insert Tab”. That will show all the commands that are in the Insert Command Ribbon. Scroll down to “Insert Page Break” and click on it. Then click on the “Add >>” button between the two boxes. Then you can use the up and down arrow buttons to the right to move the “Insert Page Break” command to where you want it in the Quick Access Toolbar.
On my toolbar, I’ve also added “Update Table of Contents” from the References Tab. Click OK when the Toolbar is the way you want it. The Update TOC command is useful because for some reason, when you add a new Heading 1 title, it is automatically added to your navigation pane but not to your TOC. I know in my previous post, I called it an automatic TOC, I guess it’s really just “easily updated semi-automatic.”
December 29, 2016
Table of Contents
For my book, I used one “page” for the title, subtitle, and author name. One page for the copyright and other “front-matter”. Then I have the Table of Contents, and then I start the main book text. You will see suggestions from some authors to put all this front-matter at the end of an e-book so the first ten percent has as much main text as possible. The front ten percent is what people see when they download the free Kindle Sample or when they click on the Look Inside option on your paperback webpage.
If your front-matter is more than six or seven pages, I would agree with putting as much as possible at the end of the book. Writers who want a gigantic number of pages for their publisher may add a summary TOC, a section about what the book will tell you, a section about what the first section of the book will tell you, a section about what the first chapter will tell you, etc., etc. I have seen some books with 20 pages of crap before you get to start reading the main text of the book!
I have written a non-fiction book and I want my readers to be able to see the TOC for free. Since that is one of only three pages of front-matter, I left it all in the front. A Table of Contents is very easy to setup in MS Word. You don’t even have to think about it until you have started your second chapter. On the first page of your main text, just type your chapter title and then select it. Then bring up the “Home” tab on your Command Ribbon and select the style called “Heading 1”. Be sure to select that style for every chapter title you write. Then you can adjust whether you want each chapter heading to be centered or bolded and what font you want them to be. After you have started your second chapter, you can create your Automatic TOC. Position your cursor at the end of the last page of front-matter. Insert a page break. Then click on the References tab on your Command Ribbon. Click on the TOC button and a list should drop down. Click on the “Automatic Table 2” option. This will create a TOC with page numbering. Click on the TOC button again and then click on the “Custom TOC” option near the bottom of the list. This will bring up a box where you can select a checkbox for “Use hyperlinks instead of page numbers”. Check that box and then click on the OK button. Finally, if your first chapter heading is on the same page as your TOC, just put the cursor in front of the first letter of the heading and insert a page break so the heading starts a new page.
Now that you have an automatic, hyperlinked TOC, you can utilize one of the coolest features of MS Word. Click on the View tab on the Command Ribbon and you should see a group of three checkbox options above the word “Show”. They are Ruler, Gridlines, and Navigation Pane. Check the Navigation Pane box and you should see a pane on the left side of your document that lists all your Chapter Headings. Clicking on any of those headings will move your cursor right to the start of that section. That’s an incredible time saver.
If your front-matter is more than six or seven pages, I would agree with putting as much as possible at the end of the book. Writers who want a gigantic number of pages for their publisher may add a summary TOC, a section about what the book will tell you, a section about what the first section of the book will tell you, a section about what the first chapter will tell you, etc., etc. I have seen some books with 20 pages of crap before you get to start reading the main text of the book!
I have written a non-fiction book and I want my readers to be able to see the TOC for free. Since that is one of only three pages of front-matter, I left it all in the front. A Table of Contents is very easy to setup in MS Word. You don’t even have to think about it until you have started your second chapter. On the first page of your main text, just type your chapter title and then select it. Then bring up the “Home” tab on your Command Ribbon and select the style called “Heading 1”. Be sure to select that style for every chapter title you write. Then you can adjust whether you want each chapter heading to be centered or bolded and what font you want them to be. After you have started your second chapter, you can create your Automatic TOC. Position your cursor at the end of the last page of front-matter. Insert a page break. Then click on the References tab on your Command Ribbon. Click on the TOC button and a list should drop down. Click on the “Automatic Table 2” option. This will create a TOC with page numbering. Click on the TOC button again and then click on the “Custom TOC” option near the bottom of the list. This will bring up a box where you can select a checkbox for “Use hyperlinks instead of page numbers”. Check that box and then click on the OK button. Finally, if your first chapter heading is on the same page as your TOC, just put the cursor in front of the first letter of the heading and insert a page break so the heading starts a new page.
Now that you have an automatic, hyperlinked TOC, you can utilize one of the coolest features of MS Word. Click on the View tab on the Command Ribbon and you should see a group of three checkbox options above the word “Show”. They are Ruler, Gridlines, and Navigation Pane. Check the Navigation Pane box and you should see a pane on the left side of your document that lists all your Chapter Headings. Clicking on any of those headings will move your cursor right to the start of that section. That’s an incredible time saver.
December 26, 2016
Using Microsoft Word
I have been using Microsoft Word, Excel, and Access for years. Not that I’m a Word Expert by any means, just that I was already familiar and comfortable with it, so I decided to use it to write my first book. I have seen other writers suggest OpenOffice because it’s free, and Scrivener because it has features like being able to corkboard index cards of information and collect research notes, and it’s good for scriptwriting. Scrivener is available for $40 at https://www.literatureandlatte.com/sc....
How to use Microsoft Word 2016
When I first started my book, I knew I wanted to write it for Kindle and paperback. I did some research to see if I could decide on what size paperback to use so that I could set the page size in Word. Turns out, it really doesn’t matter because you can easily change it at any time. I ended up going with 5” by 8”. That is one of CreateSpace’s “Industry Standard” sizes for black and white paperbacks.
But, I knew I was going to have internet hyperlinks in my e-book, so I wanted to concentrate on the e-book format first and then convert that to paperback at the end. I knew I wanted to add page numbering and footers with the book title and author name for the paperback edition, but I don’t know if that stuff is ignored when you download to KDP. I do know that KDP does not want page numbers in your Table Of Contents in your e-book. So, I wrote the whole book in e-book format and at the end I saved it as “Title Name – Kindle.docx” and when I changed the TOC to include page numbers, I saved the new file as “Title Name – Paperback.docx”.
When you are writing in e-book format you can just use the Web Layout View and not worry about how your “pages” look because there are no “pages” when you are reading on a Kindle reader. That’s because you are allowed to choose any size font you are comfortable with. But, if you are writing a book with titled chapters that you want to always start at the top of a new page, that looks a little disconcerting in the Web Layout View because each new chapter is shown just a couple lines down from the previous words. So I like to use the Print Layout View because it shows that each chapter really is at the top of a new page.
How to use Microsoft Word 2016
When I first started my book, I knew I wanted to write it for Kindle and paperback. I did some research to see if I could decide on what size paperback to use so that I could set the page size in Word. Turns out, it really doesn’t matter because you can easily change it at any time. I ended up going with 5” by 8”. That is one of CreateSpace’s “Industry Standard” sizes for black and white paperbacks.
But, I knew I was going to have internet hyperlinks in my e-book, so I wanted to concentrate on the e-book format first and then convert that to paperback at the end. I knew I wanted to add page numbering and footers with the book title and author name for the paperback edition, but I don’t know if that stuff is ignored when you download to KDP. I do know that KDP does not want page numbers in your Table Of Contents in your e-book. So, I wrote the whole book in e-book format and at the end I saved it as “Title Name – Kindle.docx” and when I changed the TOC to include page numbers, I saved the new file as “Title Name – Paperback.docx”.
When you are writing in e-book format you can just use the Web Layout View and not worry about how your “pages” look because there are no “pages” when you are reading on a Kindle reader. That’s because you are allowed to choose any size font you are comfortable with. But, if you are writing a book with titled chapters that you want to always start at the top of a new page, that looks a little disconcerting in the Web Layout View because each new chapter is shown just a couple lines down from the previous words. So I like to use the Print Layout View because it shows that each chapter really is at the top of a new page.
Word Processing
You're thinking about writing a book and you want to know which word processing program is the best to use. Microsoft Word is considered the gold standard. That doesn't mean you have to use it. There are plenty of alternatives, both free and paid for. You can check those out by going to google and searching for "best word processor".
Another thing to consider, is the "Office Suite" software. Microsoft has an office suite you have to pay for, Apache OpenOffice is free at https://www.openoffice.org/. OpenOffice does not have as many features as MS Office, but it is very good. If you’ve never used MS Office or MS Word, you might want to start with OpenOffice and see if it suits your needs. Just be aware that OpenOffice does not include an email program, a note-taking program, or included online storage space like MS Office now does. Microsoft now has a package called Office 365 Personal that costs $70 per year (https://products.office.com/en-us/off...). If you agree to this auto-renewed annual payment, you can download every Office program to one PC, including Outlook and OneNote. You’ll be able to run any Office app on one tablet and one phone for free. You’ll get one terabyte (one million megabytes) of free online storage space for use with OneDrive. You’ll get 60 minutes of Skype calls free each month. And, you’ll get free updates and free Microsoft Support for as long as you pay the annual fee. If you’ve ever used Word or Excel before, this is a pretty good deal for software you already know how to use.
Finally, if you are a beginner, you are going to want some help learning how to do things with your word processor of choice. I just went to amazon.com, selected the “books” search section, and typed “openoffice”. Amazon has 452 books about OpenOffice. Then I typed in “microsoft office” in quotes (so I don’t get books about just MS and other books about offices.) There are 14,313 books about MS Office. Or at least search results – I don’t know how many of those are real books! But, at least there is an OpenOffice for Dummies book. That would be a good start if you decide to try the free option. Then there’s YouTube tutorials and other videos. For “openoffice” there are 154,000 videos, for “microsoft office” there are 650,000 videos and for just “microsoft word” there are 582,000 videos.
Another thing to consider, is the "Office Suite" software. Microsoft has an office suite you have to pay for, Apache OpenOffice is free at https://www.openoffice.org/. OpenOffice does not have as many features as MS Office, but it is very good. If you’ve never used MS Office or MS Word, you might want to start with OpenOffice and see if it suits your needs. Just be aware that OpenOffice does not include an email program, a note-taking program, or included online storage space like MS Office now does. Microsoft now has a package called Office 365 Personal that costs $70 per year (https://products.office.com/en-us/off...). If you agree to this auto-renewed annual payment, you can download every Office program to one PC, including Outlook and OneNote. You’ll be able to run any Office app on one tablet and one phone for free. You’ll get one terabyte (one million megabytes) of free online storage space for use with OneDrive. You’ll get 60 minutes of Skype calls free each month. And, you’ll get free updates and free Microsoft Support for as long as you pay the annual fee. If you’ve ever used Word or Excel before, this is a pretty good deal for software you already know how to use.
Finally, if you are a beginner, you are going to want some help learning how to do things with your word processor of choice. I just went to amazon.com, selected the “books” search section, and typed “openoffice”. Amazon has 452 books about OpenOffice. Then I typed in “microsoft office” in quotes (so I don’t get books about just MS and other books about offices.) There are 14,313 books about MS Office. Or at least search results – I don’t know how many of those are real books! But, at least there is an OpenOffice for Dummies book. That would be a good start if you decide to try the free option. Then there’s YouTube tutorials and other videos. For “openoffice” there are 154,000 videos, for “microsoft office” there are 650,000 videos and for just “microsoft word” there are 582,000 videos.
December 24, 2016
First post / Introduction
This is a good time for me to start my first blog. I just finished publishing my first book, so I've got some time to promote it and recharge, before I start on my next book.
I was born and raised in Tampa, Florida, USA. My family has been here a long time. There is a small town a few miles southeast of Tampa, called Gibsonton. It was founded by my great-grandfather.
I'm a geeky nerd who builds his own personal computers. I've been using Microsoft Word since Word 97. That's 1997 for those of you who are not old nerds. If you are wondering why it took me this long to write my first book, that's a good question.
I've never been one of those people who can stop everything and spend almost all of their time doing just one thing. I know it takes that to be a professional athlete. Never been that! Until my father passed away about a year and a half ago, I had worked full-time jobs. I have been a computer programmer and a poker dealer, mostly. When my father passed, I got a small inheritance and his house. That gave me the opportunity to quit my regular job and the time to try to write a book.
In future posts I will be writing about using MS Word to write for both e-books and print, how to use Photoshop Elements to create covers for both, and the details of how to self-publish to CreateSpace and Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP.)
I was born and raised in Tampa, Florida, USA. My family has been here a long time. There is a small town a few miles southeast of Tampa, called Gibsonton. It was founded by my great-grandfather.
I'm a geeky nerd who builds his own personal computers. I've been using Microsoft Word since Word 97. That's 1997 for those of you who are not old nerds. If you are wondering why it took me this long to write my first book, that's a good question.
I've never been one of those people who can stop everything and spend almost all of their time doing just one thing. I know it takes that to be a professional athlete. Never been that! Until my father passed away about a year and a half ago, I had worked full-time jobs. I have been a computer programmer and a poker dealer, mostly. When my father passed, I got a small inheritance and his house. That gave me the opportunity to quit my regular job and the time to try to write a book.
In future posts I will be writing about using MS Word to write for both e-books and print, how to use Photoshop Elements to create covers for both, and the details of how to self-publish to CreateSpace and Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP.)
