AS Level ICT - Topic 7 Presenting Information

Thinking about the Audience

- Ensure that the design of the document is appropriate for the people who will be reading it e.g. poster advertising a school disco for 14-16 year olds would need a different design compared to a poster advertising a drink driving campaign

 - Information is aimed at a variety of audiences sometimes e.g. websites

Formats for Information

- Text, tabular, graphics, audio, animations and video

 - In books, reports and other printed media only text and graphics are used however information can now be shown using multimedia in presentations and websites so full range of formats can be used

Factors Affecting the Choice of Format

- The particular needs of the user - User may be partially sighted or blind so info as audio would need to be used rather than text

 - The complexity of the information - Complex information can be explained better pictorially and figures can be presented as graphs and charts (comparisons and trends)

 - Whether the material is to be presented on-line - Animations and video can be added to multimedia presentations or websites

Media

 - Examples include paper-based media, screen-based media, audio, video and multimedia

Factors Affecting the Choice of Media

Nature and Complexity of Information -> Complex information must be presented as something that is easier to read e.g. sales figures (tabulated info) needs to be printed out and studied to identify trends etc.

Time to Study -> Material which needs to be studied at length needs to be hard copy

The Needs of the Recipient -> Need to know what the purpose of the information is and how it will be used before carrying out a task

Lifespan of Information -> It is vital to use a medium for this type of info which can react almost instantaneously to the changing information (websites and on-line systems)

Word-processing

- Used to produce documents which contain text like letters, reports, etc. and for preparing text for other apps e.g. Text could be typed in using WP software and then the file could be imported into DTP

Additional Features of Word-processing Software

- Templates -> Used to specify the structure of a document like fonts, page layout etc.

 - Mail Merge -> Combining a list of names and adresses with a standard letter so a series of letters can be created with each letter being addressed to different people

 - Indexing -> Allows words to be highlighted so they can be used to form an index

 - Macros -> Used to record a series of keystrokes so your name and address can be added to the top of the page by simply pressing a single key or clicking on the mouse for example

 - Thesaurus -> Allows a word to be chosen and a list of synonyms will appear

 - Spellchecker -> Dictionary against all words typed - Grammar Checker -> Checks grammar

DTP (Desktop Publishing) Software

- Used to produce documents consisting of more than just text

 - Needs to be able to deal with lots of different types of file e.g. graphics, images from a scanner, frames from a digital video camera, still images from a digital camera and text from a word-processor

The Differences Between Home DTP Software and Word-processing Software

- Word-processing would be used for a simple document

 - WP software has many features which are in DTP software e.g. newspaper / magazine type columns, ability to create an index, use of templates etc.

Features of Professional DTP Software

- Professional level typesetting options, plug-ins, program the DTP software, curving text along a line and a more standard file format

More Advanced Features of Word-processing / DTP Software

- Style sheets or Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) - Separate content from the way that the content is presented -> If a font for a heading needs to be changed this can be done in the style sheet -> This then automatically update every page, slide, etc. -> SAVES TIME

 - Templates -> Pre-designed documents, they are partly completed documents which contain placeholder text and graphics -> You can replace the placeholder text and graphics with your own and it makes it easy to use -> Don't have to start from scratch and you only have to worry about the content -> Disadvantage is that your design can look like everybody else's

Advantages of DTP compared to WP - More control over page layout, better at integrating files from other packages, text and graphics can be put in boxes, you can create files which a professional printer can use directly, you can have text flow around irregular shapes and you can position each letter in text with much more precision

Presentation Software

- You can build a multimedia application such as a multiple choice or other type of computer-marked test using presentation software as well as viewing slides containing content

 - Features of presentation software: templates, colour schemes, backgrounds, speaker notes and handouts, headers and footers, transitions, images, re-order slides, animation effects and preview slides

 - Advanced features of presentation software: Action buttons, timing features, narration, hyperlinks, animation effects, movies and sound

Creating a Show

- Series of slides which are put together using presentation software

 - Timing, loops and there is usually some type of narration and there can be interactivity (Quizzes)

Animated Transitions

 - Movement from one slide to another and to make the transitions more interesting you can change the way the slide appears on the screen, change the speed at which it appears and get the computer to make a sound whilst the transition is occurring

Exporting Files

- Formatting the data in some way so it can be used by another application e.g. exporting an image file created using photo editing  software so it is in a format which can be used on a webpage

Importing Files

- Ability of one piece of software to read and use the data produced by a different piece of software e.g. Mail merge

Data Compression Techniques

- Best to use compressed images if images are to be used on a website (Quicker to load)

 - Makes the file size smaller making it quicker to load and copy onto other media

 - Audio files e.g. speech or music are large and these are normally saved in MP3 format which compresses the file and makes the file more manageable

 - Movie / video files are even bigger than audio files and need to be compressed

 - A compressed file allows more files to be stored on the storage medium, makes it faster to upload to put it on a webpage, makes it faster for others to download it from a webpage, makes it faster to load when viewed with any software used to view or edit it and makes it faster to transfer as an e-mail attachment

 - File compression software such as WinZip is available which reduces the sizes of files and this process is called zipping

Advantages and Disadvantages of Presentation Software

Advantages - Makes presenter look more professional, presenter can print out the slides, able to make use of full multimedia capability in their presentation, etc.

Disadvantages - Files for presentations containing video are large and require a lot of memory, people can get fed up of the special effects, good presentations can take a long time to set up, etc.

What is a Database?

- Organised collection of data or information

 - Advantage of using a computerised database is that it gives more flexibility in organising, displaying and printing and it is much faster than any manual system

 - Two types -> The limited flat-file database suitable for only a few applications and the more comprehensive and flexible relational database

Advantages of databases over other storage systems - Only have to enter data once, file / tables are linked which means that if data is changed database will automatically update other applications, structure can be easily changed, fast access

Disadvantages of databases - Server breaks down, none of the apps can be used, security needs to be thought about and users will need training (expensive)

Import / Export

- Names and addresses from a customer database can be imported into word-processing software to create a mail merge (for example)

Query

- Performing searches to extract specific data e.g. people over the age of 65, etc.

 - One way of searching for the data is to use commands written in a language called Structured Query Language (SQL)

QUERY BY EXAMPLE (QBE) ->  Simple way of running queries without having to worry about the way the statements are constructed

Report

- Output from a database in which the results are presented in a way that is controlled by the user

Web Authoring Software

- This is needed to develop a website

- Includes packages such as Microsoft FrontPage and Adobe Dreamweaver

 - Simple design features include: add and format text, adding tables, import data, hyperlinks, anchors, mailto links, preview site in different browsers

 - Hyperlinks -> Used to jump from one place to another and they can be textual or graphical -> Textual hyperlinks are words on a website which are in blue and underlined -> Graphical hyperlinks are graphics which you click on to move to a different place -> Hyperlinks can be available in PowerPoint (action buttons)

 - Formatting -> Format text in a similar way to word-processing or DTP software and you can change fonts, create bulleted lists, create columns of text, create tables and add borders and shading

 - Frames -> Used to split a window into sections and you can show 2 or more websites at a time

- HTML -> Stands for HyperText Markup Language) and it is a series of instructions used to format and display text and images on the WWW -> It is very complicated and most people who aren't experts use web authoring software because it is more user friendly

Advanced Features of Web Authoring Software

- Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) -> Save huge amounts of time because instead of applying certain formatting to each block of text you can apply an existing cascading style sheet to it which means that the blocks of text will all have the same font, etc.

 - Ability to Create a Webpage Using Frames -> Creating webpage using frames means you can have multiple webpages in a single browser window -> User can select link in one frame which loads content into another existing frame which allows the user to stay in the same browser window

 - Ability to Create a form and use it to Collect Data -> They allow you to collect data from a user e.g. you could collect name and address details for a person asking for further info about a product

 - Ability to Look at the HTML Code -> Program is generating series of HTML code when a wbsite is being developed

Use of Animation

 - Flash allows you to produce multimedia graphics on the web and allows you to create interactive movies on the web

 - Advantages of Flash -> Images are very fast to load, interactive animated images and don't need to know anything about programming to use it

Creating a Simple Animation Using Animation Software

- Frame-by-frame animation has two big problems -> Takes a lot of time and effort and ti creates very large files which can take a while to load on a website

 - TWEENING -> Computer fills in the in-between frames once it knows the start and end frames but you can only do simple animations using tweening