The Best of Both Worlds: Boot Camp with Parallels

My recommendation for folks looking to install Windows on their Intel Macs is to do the intial installation and update with Boot Camp and then later to download and install Parallels Desktop for $80 to use the same partition. Since one is more likely to actually USE the Windows environment this way (and Boot Camp does not allow simple resizing of partitions) I usually suggest that people make this partition 10GB or so, providing a little bit of headroom.

Hardware and RAM

For all but hardcore gamers, my experience is that an Intel iMac, MacMini or MacBook works equally well when given enough RAM, and basic configurations for machines at the highest possible prices are still in the $1200-1800 range, before Windows

• MacMini with 2GB of RAM and SuperDrive from Apple Store with Apple Care is $1,198
• MacBook with 2GB of RAM and SuperDrive from Apple Store with Apple Care is $1,723

If you have previously purchased a version of Windows XP as part of Microsoft's Virtual PC, my experience so far has been that this installation code will work with a standard OEM or retail WinXP media, and the release of Microsoft Vista earlier this year means that there are also various legal second-hand licenses available from folks who purchased retail copies of XP but have now upgraded.

Sharing Folders Between Mac and Windows

Securing Windows XP

Coherence in Parallels

Ready for Prime Time

If you would like help in configuring your Intel Mac to give you the best of both worlds, please consider phoning Mac Rory at (360) 695-6929.

Links

• http://www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp/
• http://www.parallels.com/en/products/desktop/
• http://www.parallels.com/products/coherence/
• http://www.nextag.com/windows-xp-pro-oem-software/search-html

Transfer, Archive and Destroy Data

When you "erase" or "trash" a file from your computer it is usually not destroyed, but only removed from easy access through a window manager (such as the Mac OS "Finder") and its space on the hard drive made available for other files to over-write. Some utility programs such as Norton "Unerase" can recover these files, as various naive criminals have discovered. To make a file unrecoverable involves over-writing its space on the hard drive several times or drastic measures such as "degaussing" the hard drive, as is done for military hardware such as the US spy plane which landed on China's Hainan Island in the spring of 2001.

For people with extremely sensitive information, there are various computer programs called "shredders" which simplify this process. Programs such as "Super Scrubber" for Mac OS will boot from a CD and use a series of military-grade wipes and over-writes to foil known methods of data recovery and remanance. In most cases the "ordinary" home user can accomplish much the same thing by simply booting from the CD which came with their computer, repartitioning the hard drive a few times and then restoring the drive to its factory-delivered state.

If you are donating or giving away a computer I strongly suggest that you find the original CD's that came with the computer, boot from those and use the "restore" function of the CD to do this. If I am not certain that manuals and such will physically stay with the machine I normally leave this boot disk in the machine itself after shutdown, so that it is wth the machine it restores. People who are more mechanically inclined, suspicious or who cannot transfer data in other ways may prefer to physically open the machine and remove the hard drive for storage or physical destruction. For all practical purposes, disassembling a hard drive and exposing the platters will effectively render it unreadable.

Saving and Transfering Software

Some "upgrade" versions of software require that you keep the older copy for installation or proof of ownership, so check your software before you give it away. If you purchased a new copy of Mac OS 10.4 "Tiger" for example and installed it onto a machine which came with Mac OS 10.2 you can legally give the copy of 10.2 that came with the machine away and install your new OS onto whatever single machine you choose. If you purchased a PC with Windows 98, though, and then later upgraded it to a newer version of Windows, you must legally transfer the original software and upgrade together. Most upgrade versions of Adobe and Microsoft software are the same, so if you have purchased upgrade versions of some software it is important to save a copy of the original "full" version.

Used Computer Hardware

Electronic waste cannot be recycled as easily as other materials, and should be disposed of responsibly. Monitors, batteries and the common "wall wart" transformers used to charge cell phones and power computers are particularly dangerous should their components leak into soil and groundwater. Like paint or other household chemicals, these should be disposed of at separate facilities. Telephone your county government for programs in your area, or consider taking your electronics to places where they will be responsibly recycled or reused.

In the Portland area we are very fortunate to have an organization called Free Geek which specializes in recycling used electronics. They ask for a small donation to defray their own disposal costs, but work with a small army of volunteers to responsibly reuse and put as many of these electronics as possible back into useful circulation. Their sister organization Mac Renewal works with them on much of the Macintosh stuff, and they have done loads of good for many years.

Businesses Beware!

Another problem that seems peculiar to businesses is the existence of specialized equipment or software that people don't normally think of as a "computer" or a "program." A certain card reader for your point of sale or inventory system, for example, is usually computer equipment, although not the sort you think of. If your entire store runs on fifteen-year-old software and a PowerMac 7200 or DOS machine it is vital that you plan for this. Usually I suggest that businesses who depend on such equipment plan immediately for its repair or replacement, such as by purchasing redundant "organ donor" machines as similar to (or identical) to their current older hardware. This makes it possible to have a quick spare when one machine breaks, and planning for this now can avoid a lot of heartache later.

So What Do I Do? At MacRory.com I am often asked by people what they should do with their used computer equipment, and my general order of preference is as follows:

1. Use your restoration CD to erase the computer and give it to someone
2. Use your restoration CD to erase the computer and donate it to charity
3. Erase the hard drive and make a donation to an organization such as Free Geek
4. Erase or remove the hard drive and take it to a designated hazardous waste area
5. Complete sets of software and manuals may also be assembled and donated
6. Almost no one wants old manuals, software or computer books older than ten years

If you would like professional help in archiving and transfering data from your old computers, please consider phoning Mac Rory at (360) 695-6929. May all your old equipment find a happy home and your new year transitions be smooth ones.

Links

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_waste
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shredding
• MacRory article on content mangaement
• Understanding file formats
• Free Geek and their Wikipedia article

Many common programs organize document data in a database and, to a certain extent, are database management systems. Email programs, for example, organize messages to sort and display messages by such fields as sender, date and subject line. Address book programs manage tables of information about contacts as do scheduling programs such as iCal, Entourage or Palm Desktop. Finance programs are essentially database managers for financial information, so if you have ever used email or Quicken, you already know quite a bit about databases.

Database Schema or Tables

At the simplest level databases are organized according to a pattern or "schema" such as a table. The best databases have a different schema for each entity: a different table for each sort of thing they are tracking. An email program, for example, will often have two tables: one to manage email messages and a second to manage email addresses. A table of addresses, or example, will list one address per row, with different columns for different attributes of each address such as first name, last name, email address and telephone number. A table (schema) of records (entities) contains fields ( or attributes) for each record, organized in a consistent way.

Advantages of a Database

1. Ability to rapidly sort or search through many records
2. More consistent entry of many small changes over time
3. Consistent long-term storage of data "behind the scenes"
4. Ability to re-use the same information in different formats
5. Ability to import or export data into different programs as needed
6. Ability to link data easily to other data, such as customers to invoices
7. Ability to generate reports and calculations from disparate data

Identifying Databases

Among the sorts of things most people track in some way are:

• Contacts: names, emails, phone numbers, customers, accounts
• Tasks: things to do, dates due, project steps, maintenance
• Appointments; dates, times, locations, notes or minutes
• Transactions: payments, receipts, invoices, bills
• Documents: memoes, instructions, directions, minutes, notes
• Inventory: equipment, supplies, manuals, service, warranties, repairs

Getting Started

Links...

• Palm Desktop
• Quicken and QuickBooks
• MYOB FirstEdge
• MYOB AccountEdge
• AppleWorks Database Tutorials
• FileMaker
• Fourth Dimension
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_management_system
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schema
• Mike Chapelle's Database Column at About
• FM Forums for FileMaker sharing
• Cottage Med free electronic medical records (EMR) managemetn software using FileMaker
• ShrinkRapt software for psychologists
• Martial Arts Organizer for gym management

Slides, Bullets and Drumbeats

By organizing data into a series of sequential slides, presentation software by its nature creates a mechanistic, lock-step narrative, unswerving in its avoidance of digression and dictatorial in its general hostility to questions. Frequently used by speakers as a crutch to avoid thinking or engaging with the audience, the perfect example of this is the technique called a "bullet build." The bullet-build is a list of five or so items, pre-arranged to appear in sequence one at a time, perhaps with an animation as if pre-ordained. If the bullet build is titled "meals served" and the title fills the upper quarter of the slide, it is guaranteed that three meals will be presented in order, without room for snacks or discussions of such pesky issues as junk food or blood sugar. Thus spake Zarathustra. A series of such slides, inexorably moving forward, has a mechanistic drumbeat drone to it and generally discourages critical thinking, especially in the hands of a nervous, inexperienced or mechanistic speaker. Like the workday for proles in Fritz Lang's 1927 movie Metropolis, this tap-tapping rhythm makes the phrase "droning PowerPoint presentation" almost a triple redundancy.

Best Practices

What then are the aesthetic and ethical rules for using presentation software? How can one use it so that it is not authoritarian, dicatatorial and didactic? Perhaps one cannot.

What Are You Doing?

People use presentation software for a variety of things, and your intent will determine if and how you use it. The best use of presentation software is perhaps in the hands of a skilled lecturer who uses it to quickly provide key ideas and references (such as citations for texts or studies) without interrupting the general narrative. Medical conferences frequently feature this sort of presentation: usually no more than a dozen or so slides, the first of which introduces the speaker, half of which cite other studies and half of which provide key illustrations which are referred to throughout the lecture and can be used in multiple ways or referred to during questions. Slides such as this are easy to find and serve an immediate need that does NOT distract from the main speaker. "Here we see a radiograph where a dark spot may indicate an abnormality."

A second use of presentation software is similar and may take place at a public briefing, including such things as contact numbers for city offices, a proposed timeline for a project and perhaps a few maps or photographs of a project area.

A third use of presentation software is at an event such as a wedding, reunion or funeral, where a series of related photos appear and disappear on the screen, perhaps to musical accompaniment. This is where presentation software starts to merge into opera or multi-media moviemaking. The point is not to provide an aid to a live speaker or a discussion but to provide a self-running presentation that may be accompanied by music or narration. Depending on the length and complexity of such a presentation, sometimes it is more logical to use a tool other than Keynote or Power Point. On the Macintosh two of the more common choices are iPhoto or iMovie, which allow one to lay down a series of slides with interesting transitional effects more quickly or to assemble slides and then record an underlying narrative, similar to a Ken Burns documentary.

The worst use presentation software is to present propaganda and canned narrative as a fait accompli. In this case the software is used to dictate a predetermined order with only the vaguest pretense of conversation or feedback. The viewer is not encouraged to ask any questions that will divert from the set script, nor are they allowed to muse on the material themselves, as they might with an artistic photo collage at a wedding or funeral. Such presentations are essentially a force-feeding of canned information, predominantly used by cookie-cutter trainers and sales people, who discourage substantive questions and dicussion. It is these sorts of presentation which lead thinkers such as Edward Tufte to denounce Power Point as essentially authoritarian and hostile to thought.

Rules of Thumb

In most cases I am of the personal opinion that the fewer slides there are in a presentation, the more honest and useful it is, provided that the slides are carefully chosen to be used in a variety of ways. Sometimes there will need to be a quick series of slides to establish background terms or timelines, but the main body of a presentation can almost always be presented in half a dozen slides, chosen for their ability to encourage questions, understanding and an attention to detail.

Another excellent guideline is to limit the amount of information per slide. The standard presentation slide is a title with a single picture or graphic and text, or perhaps a series of bullet points. Most slides should contain no more than twenty words or no more than four or five bullet points. More data than this tends to become a sea of confusion, as do more than one or two pictures at a time. Two or three pictures allow comparison. Three or more pictures are merely a collage, with little opportunity to examine them. Small pictures are too muddy to be useful and (like too many words) just become noise. Much as writing can be seen as God's way of showing you how muddled your thinking is, presentation software can show you how rambling your thoughts. Most non-academic presentations should be easily summarized on a single sheet of paper, and if your presentation will not so fit, it is good to consider why that is the case.

Consistency

Almost every presentation software package allows you to select a theme or style for your slides beforehand, and then to add a particular type of slide: a title slide, a single graphic, a graphic with caption or a bulleted list. If you use this feature it will make your slides much more consistent, and allow you to re-use your material more efficiently. Building slides separately by scratch will usually make your presentation more disjointed, so use master slides and styles much as you would styles in a word processing document.

Speaker's Notes

Many presentation programs will allow you to create a separate page of "speaker's notes" to accompany each slide, and many people use this space to write out everything they will say, word for word. If you need such a crutch, use it, but it is usually smarter to use this space to cite your sources and your references, not duplicating information that is on the main slide but providing details for the question and answer session, or to refer to during the presentation itself. If a picture comes from a web site, monograph or book, speaker's notes are an excellent place to record this fact, so that the same material can be verified or re-used later. For statistics and citations, this is especially important.

Exporting and Saving

Another thing which many presentation software packages allow you to do is to export or save your presentation so that they can be distributed as physical handouts, HTML pages or even exported to the web or DVD as movies. If you consider how your audience may wish to use your presentation, exporting it or uploading it to a web page beforehand provides a nice thing to put on your last slide. If you have a camera or iPod which can be hooked up to a large-screen television or projector, frequently a presentation can be exported as a series of JPG photographs, making the transition full circle from when presentations were first created from cameras and shown as slides.

Links...

Tools are Not People

Every sort of culture and mammal raises their children in a series of fairly predictable steps: feeding and protecting the young ones through constant communication and touch, allowing them to be present to observe activities by others, communicating with by word and gesture, encouraging imitative play and gradually correcting maladaptive mistakes or "errors." The young are weaned both physically and mentally to become functional adults in the larger environment, carrying on the species or culture beyond the parent's biological death. None of the fundamental skills are best taught at a computer, but in a physical or social world with guidance and feedback from others.

Children don't need computers. What they do need are others: mentors, elders, peers, siblings and other creatures such as plants, animals or other children to interact with and learn from in time and space. As a teacher I worked strongly for the integration of computers in the classroom, but only as TOOLS for the completion of other, relevant tasks. Computers should not be any more exalted or fetishized than paper, pencils or books; whiteboards, televisions or other objects such as science apparatus or math "manipulatives."

What Matters Most?

Lure of the Magic Bullet Techno-Fix

Kahlil Gibran's poem "On Children" speaks of how we may think of the young as personal property, but they are no more ours than we are our parents', and they shall "dwell in the house of tomorrow" which we can imagine, but never see. Whether you know how Wilhelm Fröbel invented kindergarten in the 1800's, admire Rudolf Steiner or have never heard of Maria Montessori; whether you are a fan of Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. DuBois or have no idea who they are; whatever your understanding of pedagogy or philosophy, I would guess that when you think of your child's future, their ability to program in FORTRAN is not at the top of the things you hope for.

The things of ultimate concern for a child are very similar to those of ultimate concern for an adult, and the main task of adults and parents in our culture is to focus on ultimate concerns, not tools or gizmos. The wealthiest humans have almost always educated their children through an increasingly complex and sophisticated series of manipulative experiences in the real world, alternating with tutorials and competition. Music, chess, riding, travel. Ballet, dancing, football, lacrosse. Wrestling, boxing, football, lacrosse. Childcare, cooking, sewing, conversation. Physical and social skills in the broader world are exactly the sort of things that computers do not teach, and to which even adults are tempted to retreat from in favor of computers.

Fool's Gold and Silicon Snake Oil

When parents ask me what I think about getting their child a computer I usually respond by asking them a little bit about the child's general social and athletic life, as well as the parent's aspiration for the computer. I did not seriously use a computer until college and yet I was more expert in most things now than those who did, and for every story about a tech millionaire, I can tell a dozen more about someone who is single and unhappy, working a dead-end job and eating, but not thriving. Computers are for the white middle-class what sports too often are for the African-American working class or rap music seems to many in the lower class: a lottery ticket chance at a better life. For every Tiger Woods or Bill Gates, though, there are thousands of overweight men with high cholestrol. For every Madonna or Martha Stewart, there are thousands of former dancers with skin cancer. True education is not merely vocational, but prepares the student for whatever might happen in any country, at any place, in any time.

Computers Size Everything Extra Medium

One of the fundamental problems with a computer is that it makes everything the same experience: whether you are playing chess, reading, drawing or visiting, the fundamental physical action is almost exactly the same as watching television. This cannot be developmentally appropriate, especially when basic physiological processes such as muscular coordination, spatial orientation and skills in both reading and projecting non-verbal social cues are still being developed. When I was in high school it was mainly people who could not do sports, make friends or play a musical instrument who were drawn to computers. Today computers are drawing people away from playing musical instruments, making friends or using their bodies in wholesome ways. It is not "surfing the internet" or "exploring cyberspace." It is sitting on your butt in front of a computer.

Every hour in front of a computer is an hour away from your life. If you are considering the appropriate use of life and of computers, please consider phoning for an appointment with Mac Rory at (360) 695-6929.

Links...

• Alliance for Childhood's 2000 Call for Action on Children and Computers
• Clifford Stohl's book Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway
• Synopsis of Stohl's book
• Kahlil Gibran's poem "On Children" from The Prophet
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kindergarten
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori_method
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldorf_education
• Fool's Gold: A Critical Look at Computers in Children's Education
• Dave Moursand's "Parent's Guide to Computers in Education"

The Basic Interface

The most daunting thing about a spreadsheet to beginners is the relatively complex and intimidating interface. Unlike the inviting blankness of a word processor, a spreadsheet assaults us with a tight grid of lines. Seemingly designed to make the user feel rigidly constrained and sadly inadequate, these boxes are even called cells, as in a monastery or prison. Divided into horizontal rows (like in a garden) and vertical columns (like on a building) the spreadsheet's basic element is this intersection, the cell. The contents of a cell are frequently hidden to the uninitiated, squirreled away behind the curtain in an unassuming "formula bar" or "entry bar" toward the program's upper left, between the menu bar and the first few cells, which begin where column A intersects row 1 at cell A1. To edit a given cell one normally clicks on it (to select it) and then does actual entry in the spreadsheet's "entry bar."

Three Things Can Go Into a Cell

Some spreadsheets allow one to click directly into a cell and begin typing, while others require that one clicks or otherwise selects a cell to see or enter its contents into the formula or entry bar. Usually to the left of this bar are two or three crypic symbols: a checkmark (which says "yes"), a cross-out symbol ("x" for "cancel") and perhaps a scary-looking function symbol. The second great mystery of spreadsheets (behind the division into cells) is the three things that can go into a cell

• Numbers
• Text or
• A formula

Numbers

Numbers in a spreadsheet can take the form of integers, percentages, decimals, currency, date or time, but the one thing they all share in common is that they represent a precise and discrete kind of data which can be expressed in digits and used in calculations. If you will be formatting a series of numbers as currency, percentages or whatever, the best way to do so is to select the entire cell, row or columnn you plan to format and then apply the formatting to the entire cell or group of cells, much as you would apply a word processing paragraph style. This will keep your data as "pure" and flexible as possible, without mucking it up with symbols and punctuation. Some programs will allow you to type your numbers in unmolested and some will "help" you by making assumptions and applying formats (dates especially!) without checking. Understanding how to format numbers as an attribute of a cell/row/column and how numbers differ from text is the main thing to understand. If you wish to format an entire cell or column, click on a column's head letter (or row's leftmost label number) to first select it in its entirety. To format an entire spreadsheet, click the "magic box" just up and left of cell A1.

Text

Text usually takes the form of typed labels or words, and putting text next to rows or columns to clarify what they represent is probably the best habits anyone who creates spreadsheets can acquire. A simple text label clarifies many things, and small bits of text placed in the corners of variously-sized and merged cells is also a handy way to create quick and passable forms to be printed and filled in later by hand. Sometimes if a spreadsheet won't display your text the way you want it to, you can preced it with a quotation mark or format the cell/row/column to display as text rather than a number or calculation.

Formulas

A formula is a calculation which takes the content of at least one other cell and manipulates or changes it in some way. Sometimes this is something simple (such as a text concatenation which combines the data from a "firstname" field with a space and the data from a "lastname" field to display a full name) and sometimes it is a very sophisticated function, drawn from the obscure bowels of finance and a secret chamber deep within a program's help file. Most of the time formulas are basic algebraic operations such as addition ("+"), subtraction ("-"), multiplication ("*") and division ("/") nested in various parentheses just as in basic algebra. Almost every spreadsheet invented begins any cell containing a formula with the equals sign ("="). Among the more common functions are concatenation (for text) and sum or average for numeric data. If you want the result of a formula to display in a format such as currency or percentage, format the cell to do so, just as you would for a number.

Good Hygiene

• Label your spreadsheet as clearly as possible
• Always include a header and/or footer
• Include no more worksheets than are necessary
• Use comments, if available, to make your work clear
• Try to make the spreadsheet fit logically on a page or two

Using Spreadsheets for Tables and Forms

In the real world most users use spreadsheets for extremely simple tasks: basic ledgers, tabular data or information-gathering forms. A spreadsheet can be arranged, for example, to visually resemble a printed form such as an IRS 1040-EZ or the HCFA-1500 medical billing form. Spreadsheets are often used to arrange simple tables of data for such things as address, shopping or inventory lists where one column represents a kind of data (what in database terminology would be called a "field" such as first name, last name or zip code) and each row represents a person or other item. Most useful workaday spreadsheets are rarely more complicated than a payroll sheet, a checkbook or an automobile log which automatically calculates miles-per-gallon, but the basic rules of a good spreadsheet still apply: include a descriptive header and footer, label columns and cells as clearly as possible, and consider including an automatic date and page number for any header which will be printed, potentially dropped or need filing. For most internal forms, a spreadsheet with hidden gridlines and an intelligent use of cell borders is far simpler than building the same thing in a word processor or page layout program, and although such forms are not as beautiful, they do encourage rapid deployment and quick revision.

Storing, Sorting and Summarizing

Arranging data in a table is one of the simplest ways to organize and review it, and some use spreadhsheets primarily as graph paper. Once arranged, entire rows of data can be selected and sorted quickly, and often summarized in cells near the top of a table with such simple formulas as "count," "countA," "countIF" or "average."

Graphs and Charts

Another common and valuable use of spreadsheets is to use data in a table to chart or graph data with line charts, pie charts, histiograms and others. With a bewildering array of chart types available, most users would do well to use this feature sparingly and with only simple charts. The bewildering array of chart types and options in most spreadsheet programs can easily lead to numeric nonsense and statistical non-sequitors, especially with such tempting options as "3D" and "drop shadow" to lure naive users into extraneous chart junk.

Chart Junk

"Chart junk" is Edwart Tufte's felicitous phrase to describe ink or visual objects which provide no data and cause visual confusion, in violation of what he calls the "data to ink ratio." In his brilliant book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information Tufte takes this aesthetic to places of pristine beauty, but the main message for most people who use spreadsheets is to turn OFF a lot of the distracting "features" such as unnecessary lines and grids. The spreadsheet's ability to generate fancy-looking graphs and charts is the place where this sort of junk is most egregious.

Almost every spreadsheet has a feature which lets the user select a series of cells and then "chart" that data as a pie chart, histiogram or line graph, usually with disastrous results. Although convenient for simplistic illustrations, the average user should avoid this function unless they understand something of the basic mathematics involved, and even the simplest of charts will be more effective if one takes the time to go in and turn off a lot of the "fritterware" window-dressing options such as extraneous grid lines and three-dimensional shading which add extra ink without conveying data. A basic diagram which shows the general trend and then has numbers nearby is almost always preferable to a thicket of lines and labels, so dense as to be illegible.

This is not to dissuade the user from judicious use of graphs and gridlines and shading where it increases legibility and clarity, but to encourage one to consider how much is enough. Of the data and ink on the page, how much increases insight and provides needed detail and how much clutters with crap or distracts with detritus.

Try It!

Whatever your current level of familiarity and comfort with spreadsheet programs, I encourage you to take a few minutes each week to stretch and learn a little bit more. Spreadsheets can be a very useful tool, and even a little bit of knowledge can go a long way. For more specific instruction, help or tutorials, please consider phoning Mac Rory at (360) 695-6929.

Links...

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spreadsheet
• Spreadsheet.Google.com online spreadsheets
• University of South Dakota introduction to spreadhseets, very basic
• A similar Tennessee tutorial, with a little more detail, including good screenshots
• Excellent AppleWorks spreadsheet tutorial, best for beginners
• Utah Education Network spreadsheet tutorial using Excel
• Carla Jolley's spreadsheet column at About.com
• A click-by-click tutorial on using the Open Office spreadsheet "Calc"
• Video Professor has several onscreen video tutorials available for purchase
• JunkCharts.typepad.com, educational recycling of terrible design
• Mac and Windows Academy offers training videos on a variety of spreadsheet programs
• Bill Jelsen's excellent "Mr Excel" video podcasts