DigGeog » Office_applications

Slideshare

Noel Jenkins — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 09:32:55 +0000

Thanks to Tony Cassidy for news of Slideshare, an application that allows you to share presentation files with students who may not have PowerPoint installed on their PCs. Here’s an example:

[Slideshare presentation now removed]

This presentation, and a similar one can be seen at my Slideshare space

EditGrid beta 12

Noel Jenkins — Sat, 09 Sep 2006 18:10:17 +0000

Can it get any better? Well now that EditGrid supports charts in the latest version, I’m unable to think of any improvements. The legendary Valery35 has continued to push the possibilities with KML and his recent spreadsheet examples can plot point and line information in Google Maps/Earth as well as graphics in Google Earth (although to be honest it’s all getting a bit hard for me to follow)

Online spreadsheets and KML. The possibilities are endless!

Noel Jenkins — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 08:27:15 +0000

Thanks to Geography 2.0: Virtual Globes for news that excellent online spreadsheet EditGrid now has an official add-on that supports the creation of KML for spreadsheet data. This means that spreadsheet data can be displayed on a Google Map or Google Earth.

Online spreadsheets lend themselves to all sorts of collaborative projects, whether sharing weather data, fieldwork measurements or any other kind of spatially located information. EditGrid is very student-friendly and intuitive to work with, as the following demonstration shows.
I have created a open spreadsheet which is dynamically illustrated below (i.e it will update when the data set is edited.)

Online Spreadsheet by user/juicygeography.

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Feel free to edit and contribute to the spreadsheet, click the “done” button and observe the changes in the map below. I would be interested in ideas for potential projects. Note that the spreadsheet requires longitude and latitude in decimal format. Here is an online converter. Many online maps, such as Multimap will output coordinates as decimal degrees to save the hassle.

The spreadsheet can also be seen in Google Earth.
Click here for the file.

Note that you’ll need to refresh the network link once loaded in Google Earth in order to see any changes to the spreadsheet. (Right-click on the folder and choose ‘refresh’)
I wonder how long it will be before Google Spreadsheets adds similar functionality? There are other free online spreadsheets, for example IRows which offers a chart function. EditGrid remains my favourite for several reasons. It’s very easy to use, there are several options for exporting the data and publishing to web pages. Judging by the EditGrid blog there’s lots more features to come soon, including charts (yay!) EditGrid is open source, free to use and a triumph for the developers.

Audio labels on photographs using PowerPoint

Noel Jenkins — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 20:32:10 +0000

It’s an old technique – but fun nevertheless. Take a photograph, for example this picture of a high rise block in West London.

Now copy the picture into PowerPoint. Plug a microphone into your PC and get students to add their voice annotations using the Insert / Movies and Sounds / Record Sound path. The results can be interesting.

Download a Powerpoint file
View the slideshow and click the audio icons to hear the student’s impressions of life in the Trellick Tower.
This file was made by a group of Year 7 students studying the topic of settlement. The students themselves are from a small rural town in Somerset, UK.

Spreadsheets using web queries

Noel Jenkins — Wed, 28 Dec 2005 15:14:21 +0000

This was recently mentioned in an SLN thread. I have put together a simple spreadsheet to plot wave buoy data at the Sevenstones lightship. Using a spreadsheet to harvest the latest data in this way is a compelling prospect, however at present I can’t think of a practical application!

Open the spreadsheet and select “enable macros”. After a few seconds the graph will change automatically to reflect the current readings from the lightship.
Click on chart to download spreadsheet

Thanks to Rowser for his assistance with the method. This page is a helpful intoduction to web queries.