Welcome to this Treasure Chest of Free Stuff.

Today’s featured online resource has the potential to benefit almost everyone. Most of us have either Microsoft Office or Openoffice installed on our computers, but I suspect that relatively few of us are using any of the programs in these suites as effectively as we might. Although Inpics tutorials have been designed specifically for individuals with learning disabilities, they can be helpful for anyone using any of these programms designed for productivity.

[This is another resource I learned about from Kevin Jarrit at NCS-Tech! If you have any interest in using technology in education, his blog is definitely worth a look!]

Inpics.net (online resource) This is a set of completely free visual tutorials. Inpics systematically presents simple screen shots to teach and illustrate how to use of some of the most widely used software in the world today. This includes all the component programs of Microsoft Office 2003 (Access, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher, Word) and Openoffice.org 2.0 (Base, Calc, Impress, Writer). There are also tutorials for Dreamweaver 8, as well as html and css. The tutorials cover the basics as well as advanced applications.

In the research based design of their tutorials, the people at Inpics have had individuals with learning disabilities in mind. Potentially distracting clutter, colours, animation, and wordy explanations have been avoided. The focus is on tasks peformed by the programs rather than on features. Lessons are presented as mini-projects. Not surprisingly, these tutorials are also accessible and highly effective for people without learning disabilities.

Inpics says there will soon be tutorials for Office 2007, Photoshop, Fireworks, MySQL, and PHP.

The Screenshots below show the first steps in the tutorial on using templates in Word. (Click on the screenshot to enlarge and use your browser’s back button to return to this blog.)

Welcome to this Treasure Chest of Free Stuff.

Today’s new listing is probably the most widely used suite of open source programs anywhere. OpenOffice is being refined steadily on an ongoing basis by an international team of developers.

OpenOffice.org (downloadable program) OpenOffice is a free full featured office suite that includes word processing, presentation, spreadsheet, and database programs. All of the programs are fully compatible with Microsoft Office. In some instances you can do more with OpenOffice thanyou can with MS Office. For example, you can conveniently save files in pdf format in OpenOffice’s word processor. The user interface in OpenOffice is intuitive and extremely easy to learn, especially if you are already familiar with MS Office. For more information about OpenOffice, and to download visit http://www.openoffice.org/

This program runs in Windows, Mac, and Linux.