UCS Training Programme Easter Term and Long Vacation 2009

Adobe Photoshop is the favourite image manipulation and editing tool of the professional graphics industry. It enables scanned-in photographs, pictures and graphics files to be edited and offers a dazzling array of drawing, special effects and filtering tools. Knowing where to start with such a comprehensive and feature-filled package can be daunting. This presentation aims to equip new users with the basics, using live demonstrations throughout.

This course is part of the Scientific Computing series.

PLEASE NOTE: As a pilot, this session will be video and audio recorded. If it proves successful, the intention is to publish it to the University Streaming Media Service http://sms.cam.ac.uk/. Only the presenter will be videoed.

This course is aimed at those new to programming, or who have never been formally taught the principles and basic concepts of programming. It provides an introduction to the basic concepts common to most high level languages (including Python, Java, Fortran, C, C++, Visual Basic). The aim of the course is to equip attendees with the background knowledge and confidence necessary to tackle many on-line and printed programming tutorials. It may also help attendees in deciding which programming language is suitable for their programming task.

Knowledge of the concepts presented in this course is a pre-requisite for many of the other courses in the Scientific Computing series of courses (although not for the "Python for Absolute Beginners" course).

This course offers a basic introduction to Mac OS X, the latest version of the Mac operating system. It also gives an overview of some of the more advanced functions offered by the operating system, and the core applications, which both an office or PWF user would find useful to use e.g. Microsoft Word.

[Excel 2003 also available - see note below]

This self-paced hands-on course gives an introduction to spreadsheets, databases and charting using Excel 2007. There is emphasis on short cuts and other efficient ways of working.

Unix is a widely used operating system which is run on a large range of computers including mainframes, workstations and PCs. This course is intended as an introduction for people new to Unix and focuses on the flavour of Unix provided on the PWF ("PWF Linux").

This course is suitable for absolute beginners.

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[Excel 2003 also available - see note below]

This self-paced hands-on course gives an introduction to spreadsheets, databases and charting using Excel 2007. There is emphasis on short cuts and other efficient ways of working.

[Excel 2003 also available - see note below]

This self-paced hands-on course gives an introduction to spreadsheets, databases and charting using Excel 2007. There is emphasis on short cuts and other efficient ways of working.

An introduction to the bibliography package EndNote and its interface with Microsoft Word. EndNote is a program that stores bibliographic references, and notes about those references, in an EndNote Library. EndNote then interfaces with MS Word to help you create a bibliography and bibliographic citations while you type a document. The style (contents and layout) of the citations and bibliography can then be formatted in an Output Style of your choice; this can easily be changed without retyping.

This course is part of the Scientific Computing series.

No previous experience of shell scripting is required for this course; however some knowledge of the interactive use of the bash shell is a prerequisite (see Simple Shell Scripting for Scientists: Prerequisites for details).

This course introduces shell scripting in bash for scientific computing tasks. Day one introduces very basic shell scripts in bash which process the command line in a simple fashion. Day two covers how to write more advanced shell scripts in bash. Day three covers how to make one's shell scripts more robust.

At the end of each day one or more exercises are set. It is VERY IMPORTANT that attendees attempt these exercises before the next day of the course. Attendees should make sure that they have allowed themselves sufficient study time for these exercises between each day of the course.

MATLAB is a software package for numerical computation with high quality graphics facilities. This course is for beginners and new users of the package and describes basic concepts and use of MATLAB, but not any other optional 'Toolboxes' available from the developers of MATLAB.

This self-paced hands-on course gives a "quick start" introduction to Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 which is widely used software for preparing presentations. Participants work at their own pace using a workbook containing notes and exercises, with a demonstrator on hand to help.

LaTeX is a powerful document description language built on top of TeX. It is available on Unix, Windows and Macintoshes. It can be used for the presentation of plain text (including accented characters and letters outside the English alphabet), the typesetting of mathematics, the generation of tables, and producing simple diagrams. It is particularly suited for the writing of theses, papers and technical documents.

This hands-on course will introduce cascading style sheets (CSS) and tables and show how they can (and should) be used effectively when creating web pages.

This course examines the differences between Word 2003 and Word 2007 with a view to using the new version as your default word-processor.

InDesign is a desktop publishing package available for both Macs and PCs which is used to build up a publication from ready-prepared text, images and graphics in the same way as QuarkXpress and PageMaker. Participants use pre-written text and scanned-in pictures to assemble and produce a double-sided, two-column newsletter using InDesign.