Bleeding Slugs in the Gutter (It's not as bad as it sounds)

First and foremost, let me put in a plug for our excellent InDesign/Desktop Publishing class. If you are in charge of fliers, posters, newsletters, or any other publication, you will want to sign up for this free class.

In Word, you have probably run into the problem of trying to get everything to fit on one page. You make the font a little smaller, then you make the margins a little smaller. With just one line of text left on the next page and a font size that shouldn't be any smaller, you resort to making the margins smaller and smaller until at last, it all fits on that one page. Perfect. Click print and...

"The margins of section ? are set outside the printable area of the page."Doh! This begs the question, how then do magazines and other publications print with ink to the edge of the paper?Do they just have fancier printers than I do? Well, the truth is, probably. But it's not just the printers. In desktop publishing, there are a few features of document design that enable this effect. If you have ever used InDesign, you've probably seen such terms as bleed, margin, slug, gutter, etc. All of these terms have to do with printing and document layout.

To see what I mean, open a new document in InDesign. I'll create it with the following settings:If you can't see all the options in the picture above, click More Options. Don't know what kind of measurement this is? See what Google has to say.

Once you click OK, you will see the first page of your document. And a lot of lines. At least it's colorful! Right? Well, all the lines mean something and I've put together this handy little picture as a reference for you. Below, I will discuss each line.Here is my breakdown of each one of the regions displayed above (the answer to the problem stated above is found in the bleed description):

Paper Size
This is the simplest one and easiest to understand. The black line is showing you the paper size. In our case, it is 8.5" x 11". Everything inside the black line will be visible on the final printed publication. Everything (or close to it) outside it is useful but will not be visible when all is said and done. Keep that in mind.

Margin
The margin is a region inside of the paper. It is the space between your text and the edge of the paper. Because paper gets ruffled or torn on the edges, or because you don't want the possibility of your printer messing up and printing text of the paper, we use a margin as kind of "safety zone." I personally think it helps readability if text isn't going right up to the edge.

Gutter
This is basically a margin for columns. That's it. It is the space in between two columns.

Bleed
The bleed is the red (how clever) region just outside the paper. If you were going to send your publication to a printer, they would specify how big your bleed should be. Imagine this: you are creating a publication that is 8.5" x 11". Well, like you, the publisher's printer can't print to edge of the paper. How do they do it? They print your 8.5" x 11" publication on bigger paper (the printer would tell you how big so you could set the bleed) and then they cut your paper. When they are done, it appears as if the ink bleeds right to the edge of the paper.You can see in this image that the left would be pre-printed, and the right would be end result. (picture courtesy of Printernational)

Slug
The slug is like a comments section for non-printing information that might be helpful if you are collaborating with a team of people. For example, the title of the document, any edits you may have made, the date of the most recent update, etc.

If you have any other questions or are interested in more basics of InDesign, sign up for an InDesign Foundations class today.

Branching in Qualtrics

So you’re about to create three different surveys to send to three different audiences, (for example prospective students, students, and grad students)… except you don’t know how do you make sure each respondent gets the right survey. Qualtrics has an easy answer, just create one survey and use branches to get the right information from everyone.

Start out with a question that segregates your audiences (are you a student, grad student exc.). Then set up three blocks, one for the responses for each group. Now go into your survey flow, and add branch for each possible answer to your first question. These branches work a little like skip logic in that you set up a condition, and only the respondents that meet that condition see that part of the survey. Set a condition for each possible answer to the first question, and then add as a new element the block of questions for that group.

By using branches, you just simplified your survey sending process! You now only need one mailing list, and you can ensure the right people are answering the right questions.

To learn more about Qualtrics, sign up for our Qualtrics course.

Why "Alpha?!"

The reason the transparency color option is called "Alpha" in Adobe Flash:

So you've sat through class; Adobe Flash Day 3. You're now making a slide show on your own. You've imported images, you've made them all symbols and now you're adding the fade in and fade out effects. You select your graphic symbol, cruise on down to the Properties tab and see "Color: None." Confidently, you select the drop-down menu to make your fade-out transition effects and see....Alpha? How does that even make sense?!

From what i can find, it all goes back to the development of a type of code made up of 0s and 1s that was created in the 70s. This code, which refers specifically to an element called the "alpha channel," is used for storing information about a 2D image in computer graphics. The 0s and 1s represent if there is any information to be saved per pixel. (A 0 indicates a fully transparent color and a 1 represents a fully opaque color.) I'm assuming they chose the word "Alpha" for this topmost channel because "alpha" is the first letter of the Greek alphabet (get it? ALPHAbet?) like the letter "A" (get it? A for ALPHA?!) Anyway - the process of Alpha compositing is adjusting the values in the alpha channel (the top layer where color information is stored on a per pixel basis) so as to combine the image with it's background to give it a transparent effect.

Get This!:
For the invention and development of the alpha channel, Smith, Catmull, Porter, and Duff won a technical Academy Award in 1996!!
Want to learn more about Adobe Flash or sign up for a class? Click here!

Sources:
1.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_compositing
2.http://research.swtch.com/2008/01/alpha-compositing.html

Captivating Captivate

Need to train someone in your office on using Captivate? You can actually record Captivate within Captivate. And you don't even need to install a previous version to make it happen.

Because Captivate can record Application Windows, you just need to have two instances of Captivate open at once. You can do that by opening up Captivate the first time and then repeating those same steps to open it a second time. Once you've got two Captivate instances running, you'll be able to select one from the Application drop-down menu.

Captivate away!

Resize a Captivate Project

Lots of times we have to make a full screen recording in order to capture all the necessary material for our project. However, when we publish our project, we want it to fit comfortably inside a web browser. For this to happen, you can actually resize a project after you have recorded it.

1. Click on the Project menu at the top
2. Select Rescale
3. Resize your project by changing the height/width or the height/width percentages

Tip 1: If you don't want your project to become skewed, make sure the Maintain aspect ratio check box is checked.

Tip 2: You don't want to resize your project too much or too many times. Both drastic size changes and multiple changes will reduce the clarity and resolution of your project.

Learn more about Captivate in one of our great classes! Click here to register.

Create a Basic Report in Access

This tutorial will go through the basics of creating a report in Microsoft Access 2007. These skills are covered more in depth in our Access Foundations class and our Advanced Reports SkillBuilder.

To follow along with this tutorial, download the University Records database used in our classes. If you aren't familiar with this database, take a moment to open the tables and look around to see what we're working with.

The Report
We are going to make a report that lists Students, the basic information about the courses they are taking, and the faculty that teach those courses.

Note: As you are working throughout this tutorial, it will be best to have all objects (tables, queries, reports, etc.), except for the one you are working on, closed. This will save you some headaches caused by possible Access errors

Decide the Record Source
Where is the data for your report going to come from? Will the information on your report come from one table, or multiple tables? If it is only going to come from one table, select the table by clicking on it, and skip the next step. If the record source is going to by multiple tables, consider making a query to base the report off of. That's what we're going to do.

Make the query. Using the query wizard(Create tab -> Query Wizard), let's create the record source for our report.

1. With Simple Query Wizard selected, click OK.
2. In the Tables/Queries box, select Table: Students.
1. Double click the essential fields (first and last name, byu_id, and net_id)
3. Select Table: Courses
1. Add these fields: course, transcript_title
4. Select Table: Faculty
1. Add these fields: first and last name
2. Just for fun, lets add the teacher's salary. I think it would be nice for students to see how much their teachers are making :)
5. Click Next.
6. Detail or Summary Query? Choose Detail, and click next.
7. Click Finish. Your query should look something like this...
   

Close the query, and make sure it is simply selected (It should be orange in the object navigation).

Create the Report
Okay, we're ready to make the report. Go to the Create tab and click Report (pictured below). This is to create an "Auto-Report."Grouping and Sorting
There is no need to see the same name over and over again, so we will group similar information, and then sort. We could have done the sorting in the query, but I wanted to keep the data as raw as possible.

To group classes by student, click Group and Sort (make sure you are in Layout view).At the bottom of your report, you will have a new section.Click Add Group.

We could group by name, but there are students with the same name, and it would group their schedules together. So let's group by something unique, like BYU ID. Click byu_id.To sort by last name, click Add a Sort, and then select Student_last_name.

Once you do, you'll notice that it is still sorting by BYU ID first. We need it to first sort by last name, and then group by BYU ID. To change the order of grouping and sorting, click the up arrow on the right.

We can still see information repeating over and over again, like the students' names. To put all the repeating information in the group header, we need to go to design view.Now that we are in design view, de-select the table by clicking in a blank spot of the report. All the orange-ness should go away.

We are going to delete a few things and add them back in a little bit. Click First name, and push delete. Do the same for last name, byu id, and net id.

Creating a new text box
In the "Controls" group of the ribbon, click Text Box. Then, your next click should be right under where it says "byu_id Header." Click where it now says Text 23, and push delete. Where it now says Unbound, type the following:

=[Students_first_name] & " " & [Students_last_name]

Format the text to look something like a header (bold, bigger font, etc.) It should look something like this:Now switch to layout view, and in the AutoFormat group, choose one of the prettiest formats you can find. Resize the columns so it all fits on one page by clicking one of the columns, and then clicking and dragging the right edge (the orange one) to the left.

The final report
Congratulations, that's it! Here is the final report (in the Print Preview view)