April 3, 2011 Meeting

Meeting Notes

Greetings and welcome to the special 5th Anniversary ByMUG meeting. It’s hard to believe it’s been five years since our first meeting which took place on the 1st of April, 2006.

This month’s meeting included three demonstrations.  Glenda demonstrated some quick runarounds in Microsoft Excel, Rock demonstrated how he used his Apple devices to learn French, and Jonathan talked about his new iPad 2.

Glenda’s Excel-lent Adventure

Glenda walked us through some quick Excel runarounds which she uses to create and generate forms in Excel.

Context, Locked Cells, Protected Sheets, Freezing Panes, Conditional Formatting, and Formulas, to name a few.

Question asked: Can Conditional Formatting be done in Apple Numbers?

Answer: Yes.

Rock Learns French

Rock recently learned French and he wanted to share his tips and tricks to go beyond the course.

Hint #1: On the devices you use, be it a computer or a mobile device, switch your operating system’s language to the desired language you wish to learn.  Warning: Realize that the further away from your own known languages you go, the greater the chance of you getting lost.  (i.e. English to Japanese.)

Hint #2: Change the date and time on your device accordingly.

Rock explained various items he used to learn French.

  • Oxford-Hachette Dictionary for iPad and iPhone goes for $24.99;
  • Bescherelle – Le dictionnaire des synonymes for iPad and iPhone goes for $3.99;
  • Dictionnaire Littré for iPhone is free;
  • French Gender for iPad and iPhone goes for $4.99. There is a free version available for both devices.  Shows you the gender of the word you’re using and which article to use with it;
  • La Radio de Radio-Canada for iPhone is free.  Allows you to listen to French radio;
  • Flashcards Deluxe for iPad and iPhone goes for $3.99;
  • Google Translate for iPad and iPhone is free [Editor: also available at http://translate.google.ca);
  • iTranslate for iPad is free;
  • Word Lens for iPad and iPhone is free.

Various web sites and podcasts are also available and recommended.

  • Quizlet on the web contains flash cards, vocabulary memorization, and study games.  It’s free;
  • Radio Lingua’s Coffee Break French;
  • Annenberg Learner;
  • Check out the Ottawa Public Library;
  • Les verbes is a wonderful place for French verb conjugations as well.

iPad: The Sequel

On the 25th of March, 2011, the iPad 2 came to Canada.  Fellow ByMUG member Jonathan Fingas and I got in line to get ours at the Rideau Centre.  Getting in line at 10:30 a.m., we were numbers 60 and 61.  Water and cookies were handed out for free several times by the Apple Store staff.  Morale was mostly pretty good.  Except for those who were standing further down the line, located outside in -15 Celsius temperatures.  Ever hear someone say “I don’t want to stand in line outside in these temperatures, only to find out at 5:00 p.m. that they’ve run out of iPads.”  The line-up, by the time it began to move around 4:45 p.m., spanned to Daly Street and then veered right a bit.  5:00 p.m. came and we got our iPads.

At the ByMUG meeting, Jonathan talked about his iPad 2 experience for about half an hour before the meeting came to an end. Having owned the previous version of the iPad, Jonathan was able to compare them to each other.

And that was it for the April 2011 meeting.