Meanwhile Ireland’s unemployment rate has been running at over 14% and we could make a substantial dent in this number by improving IT skills and placing qualified candidates.

IACT recently placed over 70% of candidates in full time jobs after a few relatively short but intensive IT programmes lasting 3-6 months. Programmes like these need to be well run and need committed and hard-working candidates. Recruiting strong candidates was a key to this programme’s success and we were not interested in candidates who were not fully committed to the necessary hard-work involved in the task. This commitment takes many forms but includes as foundations:

• Full attendance of every course
• Completion of all course work and projects
• A positive can-do attitude to the work at hand
• Commitment to work for substantial additional hours outside of the course
• Interaction and Involvement in the training course and commitment to assist and work with fellow students

It is the old story – you get back what you put in – and for these candidates they received the results they earned.

For each person on the unemployment register we are spending as a nation at least €10,000. We are also losing their potential tax income of at least a further €10,000. So we lose at least €20,000 per year at a minimum. Spending €5,000 on a training course doesn’t seem like a bad investment if it will return that money to the exchequer within three months and help repay our national debt forever after.

If you have friends or colleagues looking to move into the IT area and if they have the commitment and aptitude to work in IT we can help them. Let’s not export our best friends to Australia and America – let’s regroup, retrain and retain them for the good of our nation. We have a wide range of IT courses geared towards skills needed today in the IT market – call Jackie or Alex on (01) 4347600 or e-mail info@iactonline.com

Congratulations on your purchase of the IACT Introduction to PhotoShop course. IACT offer a range of other courses on Web design, Desktop Publishing, Programming and Networking that can all be taken in our classroom or online. We also provide very cost effective licencing for companies and individuals to use all of these materials in-house and can help develop customised eLearning (covering any other topic or software product you may use).

Introduction to Adobe PhotoShop

We know you’ll LOVE Adobe PhotoShop and can’t wait to take through this amazing program and get you totally hooked!

To register for your course you need your Groupon Voucher
(not the security code). To register for the course click here

While you await for the activation if you haven’t yet got Adobe PhotoShop or PhotoShop elements – we recommend you download a FREE trial version from Adobe and start playing with the program.
It is a fantastic upgrade from Adobe and has many powerful and cool features.

If you wish to continue to learn more about the Adobe suite of products please e-mail info@iactonline.com and we’ll talk you through the options.

We are excited about The Raspberry Pi – a $35 computer that runs Linux and will help create a new generation of programmers – just as the Commodore 64, Sinclair Spectrum and BBC Micro did in the 1980s.

The Raspberry Pi is a tiny and cheap computer. The idea for the Raspberry Pi came about in 2006, when Eben Upton and his colleagues at the University of Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory, became concerned about the year-on-year decline in the numbers and skills levels of the A Level students applying to Computer Science in each academic year. From a situation in the 1990s where most of those applying were coming to interview as experienced hobbyist programmers, the landscape in the 2000s was very different; a typical applicant might only have done a little web design…

The Raspberry Pi circuit board

The developers of the Raspberry Pi don’t claim to have all the answers - but their project  will act as a powerful catalyst for change. They are making cheap and programmable computers widely available and they are actively encouraging other companies to clone what  they are doing. They want to break the paradigm where without spending hundreds of euros on a PC, families can use the internet. They want owning a truly personal computer to be normal – and they believe that 2012 is going to be a very exciting year.

IACT will be running courses that include a free Raspberry PI pre-configured with an easy to use development environment. Access to the powerful free open source software running on the Raspberry Pi will be a huge benefit for new programmers and will help create an army of developers needed to help fuel Ireland’s burgeoning knowledge economy.

We have courses from 3-6 months in duration that will start you on a professional IT programming career.

Are you interested in learning how to program? The Raspberry PI is set to shake up the PC world and create fantastic new opportunities for anyone with a keen interest in computers. Send an e-mail to info@iactonline.com or call (01) 434-7600 for more information.

Congratulations on your purchase of the IACT Microsoft Office 2010 eLearning course. We’ve designed this course based on our classroom training courses for Office 2010. We offer a range of other courses on Web design, Desktop Publishing, Programming and Networking that can all be taken online. We also provide very cost effective licencing for companies and individuals to use all of these materials in-house and can help develop customised eLearning (covering any other topic or software product you may use).

Microsoft Office 2010 Online Course

To gain access to your online course you need your Groupon Voucher (not the security code). To register for the course click here

While you await for the activation if you haven’t yet got Microsoft Office 2010 – we recommend you download a FREE trial version from Microsoft Ireland and start playing with the program. It is a fantastic upgrade from Microsoft and has many powerful new features.

If you wish to take the Microsoft Office 2010 examinations on completion of this course please e-mail mos@iactonline.com with your location and we’ll co-ordinate your examinations for you.

Word Mobile 2010 for Windows Phone 7
If you have Windows Phone 7, you can use Microsoft Office Mobile 2010 to work with your files from anywhere—whether you’re at work, at home, or on the go. Word Mobile 2010 is part of Office Mobile and already on your Windows Phone 7 in the Office hub, so you don’t need to download or install anything else to get started.

You can use Word Mobile to view and edit documents stored on your phone, sent to you as email attachments, or hosted on a SharePoint 2010 site through SharePoint Workspace Mobile 2010. When you edit a document via SharePoint Workspace Mobile, you can save your changes back to the SharePoint site when you’re online.

With Word Mobile, you can create or update your documents using many of the same formatting tools that you already know and use in the desktop version of Word, add comments, and use the new outline pane to quickly jump to a heading or comment.

Word Web application

Even when you’re away from Word, you can store your documents on a Web server and use the Word Web application to open the document in your browser. You’ll be able to view it and even make changes.

Bring your best ideas to life
Word 2010 pairs its functional features — such as tables, headers and footers, and style sets — with eye-catching effects, new text features, and easier navigation.

Format text and images together for a seamless look
Word 2010 provides artistic effects for both pictures and text. And when you apply the effects to text, you can still run spell check.

 Plain picture and text formatting

 Picture and text with shadow formatting

Find your way through long documents with the new Document Navigation pane and Search
In Word 2010, you can quickly find your way around long documents. You can easily reorganize your documents by dragging and dropping headings instead of copying and pasting. And you can find content by using incremental search, so you do not need to know exactly what you are searching for to find it.

In Word 2010 you can do the following:

• Move between headings in your document by clicking on the parts of the document map.
  
• Collapse levels of the outline to hide nested headings, so you can work easily with the map even in deeply structured and complicated long documents.
  
• Type text into the search box to find your place instantly.
  
• Drag and drop headings within your document to rearrange the structure. You can also delete, cut, or copy headings and their content.
  
• Easily promote or demote a given heading, or a heading and all of its nested headings, up or down within the hierarchy.
  
• Add new headings to your document to build a basic outline or insert new headings without having to scroll around in the document.
  
• Stay aware of the content being edited by others by browsing the headings that contain a co-authoring indicator.
  
• See thumbnails of all the pages in your document and click on them to move through your document.
  

Illustrate your ideas
Word 2010 brings many graphic enhancements to your work, so you can easily make the impact you want.

New SmartArt graphic picture layouts
In Word 2010, you can use the new SmartArt graphics picture layouts to tell your story with photographs or other images. Just insert your pictures in the SmartArt shapes of your picture layout diagram. Each shape also has a caption where you can add descriptive text.

Even better, if you already have pictures in your document, you can quickly convert them to a SmartArt graphic, just like you can with text.

Using this layout to create a SmartArt graphic is simple:

1. Insert the SmartArt graphic picture layout.
   
2. Add your photographs.
   
3. Write descriptive text.
   

Word includes several different picture layouts to choose from.

New artistic effects
With Word 2010, you can now apply sophisticated “artistic” effects to your picture to make the picture look more like a sketch, drawing, or painting. It’s an easy way to enhance your images without using additional photo-editing programs.

Some of the 20 new artistic effects include Pencil Sketch, Line Drawing, Watercolor Sponge, Mosaic Bubbles, Glass, Pastels Smooth, Plastic Wrap, Photocopy, and Paint Strokes.

Picture corrections
You can now transform your images into compelling, vibrant visuals by fine-tuning the color intensity (saturation) and color tone (temperature) of a picture. You can also adjust brightness, contrast, sharpness, and blurriness, or you can recolor the picture to better match your document content and to make your work pop.

Automatic background removal of pictures
Another advanced picture editing option in Word 2010 is the ability to automatically remove unwanted portions of a picture, such as the background, to highlight the subject of the picture or to remove distracting detail.

Better picture compression and cropping
Use the new and improved picture-editing tools to trim images and get just the look that you want. Now you have better control of the image quality and compression trade-offs so that you can make the right choice for the medium (print, screen, or e-mail) that your document is used for.

Inserting screenshots
Quickly add screenshots to capture and incorporate visual illustrations into your work in Word 2010. After you add the screenshot, you can use the tools on the Picture Tools tab to edit and enhance the screenshot. When you reuse your screenshots across documents, take advantage of the Paste Preview feature to see what your additions will look like before you drop them in.

Clip art options with Clip Organizer
You can now use, submit, and find thousands of new pieces of community clip art, in addition to the images, videos, and other media you can add to your document. You can see who submitted pieces of community-submitted clip art and report if the images are inappropriate or unsafe.

Work more easily
In Word 2010, you can customize your workspace so that the commands you use often are all together. You can also access earlier versions of your document, and you can more easily work with text that’s in other languages.

Customize the Ribbon
You can use customizations to personalize the Ribbon, which is part of the Microsoft Office Fluent user interface, to be the way that you want it. You can create custom tabs and custom groups that contain the commands you use most frequently.

The Microsoft Office Backstage view
In the Microsoft Office Backstage view, you do everything to a file that you do not do in the file. The latest innovation in the Microsoft Office Fluent user interface and a companion feature to the Ribbon, the Backstage view is where you manage your files — creating, saving, inspecting for hidden metadata or personal information and setting options.

Recover unsaved work
It is now easier to recover a Word document if you close your file without saving, or if you want to review or return to an earlier version of the file you’re already working in. As with earlier versions of Word, enabling AutoRecover will save versions while you are working in your file at the interval you select.

Now, you can keep the last autosaved version of a file in case you accidentally close that file without saving, so that you can easily restore it the next time that you open the file. Also, while you are working in your file, you can access a list of the autosaved files from the Microsoft Office Backstage view.

Point to text to see a translation
When you turn on the Mini Translator, you can point to a word or selected phrase with your mouse and see a translation in a small window. The Mini Translator also includes a Play button so you can hear an audio pronunciation of the word or phrase and a Copy button so you can paste the translation into another document.

You don’t even need the language pack, language interface pack, or proofing tools installed on your computer to see a translation in that language.

Simplified language preference setting
Multilingual users can easily access a single dialog box where you can set the editing, display, ScreenTip, and Help languages. If you don’t have the software or keyboard layout installed that you need, you are alerted and links are provided to make it easier to solve the problem.

IACT offer a range of courses in Word including Word Level 2 and our popular MOS training courses.

What are sparklines?

Unlike charts on an Excel worksheet, sparklines are not objects — a sparkline is actually a tiny chart in the background of a cell. The following picture shows a column sparkline in cell F2 and a line sparkline in F3. Both of these sparklines get their data from cells A2 through E2 and display a chart inside a cell that shows the performance of a stock. The charts show the values by quarter, highlight the high value (3/31/08) and the low value (12/31/08), show all the data points, and show the downward trend for the year.

A sparkline in cell F6 shows the 5-year performance for the same stock, but displays a Win/Loss bar chart that shows only whether the year had a gain (as in the years 2004 through 2007) or a loss (2008). This sparkline uses values from cells A6 through E6.

Because a sparkline is a tiny chart embedded in a cell, you can enter text in a cell and use a sparkline as its background, as shown in the following picture.

Fig. 1  In this sparkline, the high value marker is green, and the low value marker is orange. All other markers are shown in black.

You can apply a color scheme to your sparklines by choosing a built-in format from the Style gallery (Design tab, which becomes available when you select a cell that contains a sparkline). You can use the Sparkline Color or Marker Color commands to choose a color for the high, low, first, and last values (such as green for high, and orange for low).

Why use sparklines?

Data presented in a row or column is useful, but patterns can be hard to spot at a glance. The context for these numbers can be provided by inserting sparklines next to the data. Taking up a small amount of room, a sparkline can display a trend based on adjacent data in a clear and compact graphical representation. Although it’s not mandatory for a sparkline cell to be directly next to its underlying data, it is a good practice.

You can quickly see the relationship between a sparkline and its underlying data, and when your data changes you can see the change in the sparkline immediately. In addition to creating a single sparkline for a row or column of data, you can create several sparklines at the same time by selecting multiple cells that correspond to underlying data, as shown in the following picture.

You can also create sparklines for rows of data that you add later by using the fill handle on an adjacent cell that contains a sparkline.

1. The range of data used by a group of sparklines
2. A group of sparklines

One advantage of using sparklines is that, unlike charts, sparklines are printed when you print a worksheet that contains them.

Create a sparkline

1. Select an empty cell or group of empty cells in which you want to insert one or more sparklines.
2. On the Insert tab, in the Sparklines group, click the type of sparkline that you want to create: Line, Column, or Win/Loss.

1. In the Data box, type the range of the cells that contain the data on which you want to base the sparklines.

Note    You can click to temporarily collapse the dialog box, select the range of cells that you want on the worksheet, and then click to restore the dialog box to its normal size.

When one or more sparklines are selected, the Sparkline Tools appear, displaying the Design tab. On the Design tab, you can choose one or more of several commands from among the following groups: Sparkline, Type, Show/Hide, Style, and Group. Use these commands to create a new sparkline, change its type, format it, show or hide data points on a line sparkline, or format the vertical axis in a sparkline group. These options are described in detail in the following section.

Customize sparklines

After you create sparklines, you can control which value points are shown (such as the high, low, first, last, or any negative values), change the type of the sparkline (Line, Column, or Win/Loss), apply styles from a gallery or set individual formatting options, set options on the vertical axis, and control how empty or zero values are shown in the sparkline.

Control which value points are shown

You can highlight individual data markers (values) in a line sparkline by making some or all of the markers visible.

In this sparkline, the high value marker is green, and the low value marker is orange. All other markers are shown in black.

• To show all values, select the Markers check box.
• To show negative values, select the Negative Points check box.
• To show the highest or the lowest values, select the High Point or Low Point check boxes.
• To show the first or the last values, select the First Point or Last Point check boxes.

Change the style of or format sparklines

Use the Style gallery on Design tab, which becomes available when you select a cell that contains a sparkline.

1. Select a single sparkline or a sparkline group.
2. To apply a predefined style, on the Design tab, in the Style group, click a style or click the arrow at the lower right corner of the box to see additional styles.

1. To apply specific formatting to a sparkline, use the Sparkline Color or the Marker Color commands.

Show or hide data markers

On a sparkline that has the Line style, you can show data markers so that you can highlight individual values.

1. Select a sparkline.
2. In the Show/Hide group, on the Design tab, select any of the check boxes to show individual markers (such as high, low, negative, first, or last), or select the Markers check box to show all markers.

Clearing a check box hides the specified marker or markers.

Show and customize axis settings

You can select Date Axis Type (in the Group group, click Axis) to format the shape of the chart in a sparkline to reflect any irregular time periods in the underlying data.

In a line sparkline, applying the Date Axis type can change the slope of a plotted line and the position of its data points in relation to each other.

In a column sparkline, applying the Data Axis type can change the width of and increase or decrease the distance between the columns, as shown in the following image.

In the example shown here, there are two column sparklines that use data from the same range. The sparkline with the “Trend” label uses the General Axis type, and the sparkline with the “Trend (Data Axis Type)” label uses the Date Axis type. In each sparkline, the first two data points are separated by two months, and the second and third are separated by seven months. By applying the Date Axis type, the space between the three columns changes proportionally to reflect the irregular time periods.

You can also use these Axis options to set minimum and maximum values for the vertical axis of a sparkline or sparkline group. Setting these values explicitly helps you control the scale so that the relationship between values is shown in a more meaningful way.

1. With the sparkline or sparkline group selected, in the Group group, click Axis.
2. Under Vertical Axis Minimum Value Options or Vertical Axis Minimum Value Options, click Custom Value.
3. Set minimum or maximum values that you feel will best emphasize the values in the sparklines.

You can increase the height of the row that contains the sparkline to more dramatically emphasize the difference in data values if some is very small and some is very large.

You can also use the Plot Data Right-to-Left option to change the direction in which data is plotted in a sparkline or sparkline group.

If there are negative values in your data, you can emphasize this by showing a horizontal axis in your sparkline.

1. With the sparkline or sparkline group selected, in the Group group, click Axis.
2. Under Horizontal Axis Options, click Show Axis.
   Any sparklines that contain negative data will display a horizontal axis at 0.

Handle empty cells or zero values

You can control how a sparkline handles empty cells in a range (and thus how the sparkline is displayed) by using the Hidden and Empty Cell Settings dialog box.

IACT offer a wide range of courses in Excel including our Excel Dashboards and iExcel master programmes.

Apple’s latest iPhone 4S includes an upgrade to IOS 5 that includes Siri – an electronic personal assistant built into the Operating System. Siri is seriously impressive technology and is able to recognise most voices without any training whatsoever – and it can pick up your voice in very difficult environments. It understands remarkably well what you mean when you phrase things in a range of different ways – so you don’t have to speak like a robot to get your message understood – regular speech and regular speeds are fine for Siri.

Once you’ve asked Siri to do something (and it’s pretty flexible) it consults with Apple’s servers to work out what you want to do. All this happens very quickly and remarkably reliably.

Siri also talks to you in a very acceptable computer voice – and provides a real benefit for mobile accessibility.

Here are a few of questions you can put to Siri right now…

• Check out the weather where you are or where you are going to.
• Find a good Italian restaurant near you (in the US only at the moment)
• Send a text to your mom (and dictate the message)
• Set a reminder for tomorrow afternoon to make a call
• Play a song by the artists name
• Check a stock price

and much more…  If it can’t find the answer it will offer to search the web.

When you finish speaking, Siri displays the text of what you said and provides a response. If Siri needs more information to complete a request, it will ask you a question. For example, if you say “Remind me to call my mom,” Siri will ask “What time would you like me to remind you?”

The future for Siri is very exciting – as the database of questions that Apple will start to harvest will inevitably lead to great improvements. It won’t be long before Siri will offer a whole range of additional services – want to book a flight? Ask Siri to do it for you. Want to rent a car? Specify the type and kind and where you’ll be – then leave it to Siri. Paying a bill – talk to Siri. Want an analysis on your stock portfolio – why not ask Siri? Running a temperature with a pain in your left ear? Consult Siri.

Steve Jobs was a visionary without equal and the last product he got to see launched is – as ever – remarkable.

For more information on Siri visit the Apple site

IACT are a QuarkXpress Gold Partner and we can provide training for you on QuarkXpress. For more information call us on (01) 4347600 or e-mail info@iact.ie

IACT provide classroom training and consultancy on Adobe PhotoShop, Illustrator, InDesign as well as their video editing suite. For more information please contact us.

The proliferation of social media has brought about a fundamental shift in the way consumers interact with digital content. What started as isolated channels of leisurely distractions has become one of the primary ways that enterprise brands are shaped and buying decisions are made by consumers. How do enterprises survive in a market where digital experiences dominate brand mindshare and influence real revenue? How can enterprises gain the competitive advantage in a world where personalized social experience is king?

According to Forrester’s Online Retail Forecast, by 2014, “more than half of total retail sales will be influenced by the web.” Furthermore, while traditional brick-and-mortar retail sales have been decreasing during the economic downturn, online purchases grew 11% in 2009, with a projected 10% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) through 2014. These figures are arguably conservative considering that digital interactions between businesses and customers seep into every moment of our lives with the increasing adoption of mobile devices.

This trend is accelerating. As digital experiences become more engaging, consumers spend more time online as well as more dollars. Digital interactions become even more valuable to enterprises as they seek to make these interactions more engaging and pervasive.

Web content management (WCM) systems, which are built on the promise of helping enterprises create, manage, and deliver content, fall short as an enabler of marketing and e-business strategies in this new era. Instead, an enterprise’s digital properties must be more than one-way broadcasts of information. Customers desire connection, conversation, and interaction.

Adobe’s Web Experience Management (WEM) solution helps to enable enterprises to optimize their digital channels to acquire new customers, capture customer insight, and deliver personalized content that leads to increased conversion rates and brand engagement.

Adobe’s Web Experience Management solution extends an enterprise-class WCM foundation to:

• Capture real-time customer insight through integration with the Adobe® Online Marketing Suite and measure content relevance and audience engagement
• Store, review, and manage rich content across many channels within the WEM media library or for more advanced requirements extend the solution to the digital asset management system as part of Adobe’s Integrated Content Review solution^*
• Enable content personalization and dynamic delivery with rules-based targeting that provides closed-loop feedback of digital-asset effectiveness
• Quickly launch targeted campaigns to capture leads across multiple channels, including web, mobile, and email
• Help foster community and empower customers through social collaboration, including comments, ratings, blogs, forums, and wikis

Adobe’s tools help enterprises create incredible digital experiences. We work with marketing and e-business professionals who use Adobe Creative Suite components, such as Adobe Premiere Pro, Photoshop, and Illustrator to produce compelling digital content that vividly represents an enterprise’s brand.

Mobile is critical to every enterprise’s web presence. According to Mary Meeker, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the number of mobile users will be greater than desktop Internet users by 2013.		Deep integration with market-leading online analytics helps ensure deep insight into the digital interactions that impact revenue and brand.

Now, with Adobe’s Web Experience Management solution, enterprises can help manage mass personalization of interactive experiences, listen to feedback across all digital channels, and optimize engagement by adjusting content to customer context. IACT provide training and consultancy services on Adobe Products for eLearning, web design and Desktop Publishing. For more information please contact us.