REGISTRATION FOR NEXT SERIES-THURSDAY JANUARY 27TH, 2011

Mark Your Calendar - Registration for the next series at 1000 Southern Artery - Series #49 -will be held bright & early NEXT Thursday morning – January 27th at the Southern Artery Office... so mark your calendar and pass the word...

Series #49, is ten (10) weeks and each class is 90 minutes. This new series begins the week of February 7th and continues thru the end of April. During this series no classes will be held:

• Mon-Fri, Feb. 21-25 February School Vacation and
• Mon-Fri, April 18-22, April School Vacation

If you know someone who might enjoy our classes invite them to join us and feel free to share the blog address with them:
http://www.saseniorpcgeeks.blogspot.com

We have classes for everyone at every level

Our Morning Classes are Monday thru Wednesday 9am and 10:30am

• BEGINNER: Covers the BASICS and is a wonderful introduction for anyone just getting comfortable with using a computer or laptop - we will talk about the hardware, 4 different types of software (operating system, application, browser and drivers), keyboard and mouse skills – when and why to left & right click and much more...

• INTERMEDIATE 1/INTERNET: Covers the basics of the Internet, including the parts of a web address, how to surf the Internet, hyperlinks, using email and the parts of an email address, working with email attachments and much more

• INTERMEDIATE 2/WORD: Covers the basics of Word Processing using Microsoft Word – setting up a document, margins, font styles and sizes, inserting photos, clip art and word art, highlighting, copy and pasting and much more

• INTERMEDIATE 3/EXCEL BASICS: Covers the basics of Spreadsheets for data and list management using Microsoft Excel – setting up a spreadsheets – basics of workbook & worksheets; margins, columns, rows, cells, formula bar, auto fill, entering data, auto sum, basic formulas, sorting data, formatting cells, highlighting, copy and pasting from one sheet to another and much more

Our Afternoon Classes are Monday & Tuesday at 1pm, Wednesday & Thursday 12:30pm & 2:pm

• ADVANCED: Each and every series our focus change - based on requests for students. All afternoon classes however, continue to build on the basic skills learned in our morning classes and we also review and introduce many of the new programs and technologies available...

Topics we will be working on during our next Series #49 (Feb-April 2011) will be:

• Review of changes in both Hotmail & Gmail accounts – lots of new features
• Review of Buying and Shopping on Line – EBay & Craig's List
• Picasa Photo Editing – Changes & new features, including name tags & uploading to YouTube
• Review What’s New in Windows 7 and quick review of changes in Office 2010
• Google application and features - many new ones
• Copying data to and from a computer and/or digital camera to your flash/memory stick

Our afternoon class topics vary each new series and students input on what they want to learn is a critical part of how each new series is established.. Topics we've worked on: digital cameras and photos, including scanning and editing photos and photo projects such as creating and publishing books, making slide shows or movies, working with music including downloading from iTunes, creating CD’s, other special projects using word processing skills, such as creating iron-on transfers, note cards, invitations, mailing lists, mail merges for holiday mailings, excel list management, power point slide shows, using Picasa Photo Editing and Windows Movie Maker and much much more…

If you have questions about a specific class - you are welcome to stop by and ask Jean McCarty or Bob Donovan who will gladly help guide you to the class that will be right for you or email Cherie Houston at cherie_houston@hotmail.com

DOWNLOADING PICASA 3

PICASA (a Google product) is a FREE award-winning software used for working with photos, on your PC, from emails, disk, CD-Rom and digital cameras.

**PICASA’S NEW VERSION 3, can only be used with Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7. If you are using an older “Operating System” such as Windows 98, 2000, ME, then you will continue to use Picasa Version 2

Downloading Picasa to your computer is quick and easy and again FREE - Just open your Internet and on the Internet address toolbar, type: http://www.picasa.com/

• Click on the button that says “DOWNLOAD PICASA”
• This brings you to a dialog box where you must choose whether to “RUN” or “Save” the file, Click “RUN”.
• Depending on your Internet service speed, this may take a few minutes
• Another dialog box will appear asking: Do you want to RUN the software? Click RUN
• The software should be installed on your computer. If you’re asked other questions, respond “yes” or “OK”. Picasa 3 will be installed on your PC
• Picasa then will search over your whole computer for pictures or merely look in the “MYPICTURES” directory. I prefer the MYPICTURES directory only, but you can choose whatever option you wish
• The Picasa Icon is now created and on your desktop (and you can add it to your Quick Launch)
• The Picasa Media Detector should be installed on the system tray in the taskbar toolbar. This is necessary so that Picasa 3 can add any new photos that are added to the MyPictures folder.

Picasa software allow you to:

• Create quick & easy photo Slide Shows- with or without music
• Easy to view Photo Library
• Numerous quick & easy photo editing tools including red eye reduction, cropping and changing photos form color to black & white or sepia
• Photos can be sorted by folder or timeline
• Great tools for printing - wallet, 4 x 6 or full page
• You can convert you photos to movies with sound & motion
• You can easily upload your photos to an online web album for easy sharing
• Or identify all "faces" in your photos for easy sorting-called tagging
• and much much more...

Once you have download the free software, like all Google products, there are great tutorials which will help you learn to use the software - or join us in class...

Picasa - Geotagging Photos with Google Earth

You need to have Google Earth and Picasa installed on your computer to use this feature. This feature is not currently available in Picasa for Mac.

Download Picasa - go to http://www.picasa.com/

Download Google Earch - go to http://www.earth.google.com/

The easiest way to match your photos to a specific location is to use Google Maps in Picasa. However, you can also use the original geotag feature in Picasa, which launched Google Earth to accomplish the same thing. Geotagging your photo does the following:
• Embeds location information within your photo.
• Displays your photo on a satellite map rendered by Google Earth.

To geotag a photo, follow these steps:

1. Select the photos in Picasa.
2. Click the Geotag button in the Photo Tray. Google Earth opens up and a small Picasa window appears in the lower-right corner.
3. Navigate and zoom to the location in Google Earth that corresponds with where your picture was taken, and place the yellow cross-hairs on your chosen spot.
4. Click the Geotag button to place the selected photo. You can also click the Geotag All button to tag all of the selected pictures with the same location information.
5. When all of your pictures are geotagged, click the Done button to finish the placement.
6. When you exit Google Earth, click the Yes button to save the geotagged locations in your 'My Places' folder.
7. You'll then be able to access the photos in 'My Places' any time you open up Google Earth.

Picasa will write the longitude and latitude to the photo's EXIF GPS metadata. You can view this data (GPS Latitude and Longitude) by right-clicking (Windows) Control-clicking (Mac) a geotagged image in Picasa and selecting Properties. Geotagged photos are marked in Picasa by a small cross-hair icon on their thumbnails.