All University Information Services courses

SPSS is a powerful general purpose statistical package with high quality graphics and tabulation facilities, and a reputation for being relatively user-friendly. This course is for beginners and fairly new users of the package. Basic concepts and use of SPSS will be introduced. The main aim of the course is to give participants a foundation and some background. However statistical techniques are not covered (see note below).

SPSS is a powerful general purpose statistical package with high quality graphics and tabulation facilities, and a reputation for being relatively user-friendly. This session follows on from Part 1 and covers useful techniques and tricks. It is strongly recommended for anyone likely to use SPSS for any but the very simplest analysis of the very simplest data.

This session follows on from SPSS: Basic Parts 1 and 2 and continues to introduce useful techniques for data analysis with SPSS. Working with sensitive data types will be covered and a basic introduction to SPSS command language.

The SPSS for Windows statistical package includes a built-in Tutorial and a set of Case Studies. When SPSS is launched, the Tutorial is one of the options offered. Alternatively, it may be found under the Help menu where the Case Studies are also located.

Stata is a powerful general purpose statistical package.

This course is for beginners and fairly new users of the package. Basic concepts and use of Stata will be introduced. The main aim of the course is to give participants a foundation and some background. However statistical techniques are not covered (see note below).

The first session looks at an overview of the Stata system and getting data into Stata format and the second looks at reporting, graphing and analyses. It is strongly recommended for anyone likely to use Stata for any but the very simplest analysis of the very simplest data.

This course is for new users who have learnt how to get data into Stata, and know how to operate basic syntax having completed the Basics course or through self-study with the student version or manuals. Emphasis will be on examples of running applied analyses of regression models for continuous, binary and ordinal outcomes using standard Stata procedures. Guidance will also be provided on further addons that may be of interest.

Statistics for the Terrified is a tutorial available on the PWF PCs aimed at people who want a very basic introduction to statistical concepts and techniques. It does not cover the use of any particular software, nor any advanced or specialist topics.

This course is for Graduate Life Sciences Students only

A course in basic C programming intended for beginners to programming only. The aim of the course is to get everyone to the stage of being able to write small utility programs in C for carrying out simple calculations and data manipulation.

Managing Safely is ideally suited to managers, research supervisors, administrators with safety responsibilities and Departmental Safety Officers across all sectors of the University. It leads to a nationally recognised and accredited training certificate. Please contact the course organiser, Will Hudson (wjh29@admin.cam.ac.uk) for further details before booking on the course.

This course is part of the Scientific Computing series.

It is common for a student or researcher to find a piece of software or to have one thrust upon them by a supervisor which they must then build, install and use. It is a myth that any of this requires system privilege. This course demonstrates the building, installation and use of typical software ranging from trivially easy examples (the "configure, make, install" scheme) through to the evils of badly written Makefiles. Common errors and what they mean will be covered and by the end of the course the student should be able to manage their own software without needing to pester their system administrator.

The course is designed to take someone from having no knowledge of the Unix command line to being able to navigate around directories, and doing simple file manipulation. Then some of the more basic commands, will be introduced, including information on how to get more help from the system itself. Finally accessing remote computers by ssh and the most basic of shell scripts will be introduced.

This course is part of the Scientific Computing series.

Please note that this course is NOT suitable for beginner or novice shell scripters. It is also NOT suitable for those who do not have significant practical experience of writing (or trying to write) their own shell scripts.

The purpose of this workshop is to give attendees the opportunity to ask questions about any problems they have encountered in trying to write their own shell scripts in bash, and to obtain advice on how to tackle more complex shell scripting tasks. It is unlikely to be of use to attendees who do not have some experience of writing shell scripts for their own purposes.

It is essential that those attending the workshop have thought of some questions to ask the presenters, or of some scenarios/problems they wish to explore with the presenters, prior to attending.

The intended audience of this workshop is those who have previously attended the Unix Shell Scripting course.

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.

This self-paced hands-on course gives a quick introduction to the Vi text editor, a widely available text editor for Unix (and other) systems. Participants work at their own pace using provided notes and exercises, with a demonstrator on hand to help.

This course is designed for users new to the software who need to create various types of chart including organisational charts, Gantt charts and flowcharts. The skills and knowledge acquired in this course are sufficient to be able to use and operate the software at an efficient level and covers from beginners to intermediate skills. It is fast paced.

A set of 5 CD-ROMs by BVG on programming in Visual Basic version 6.

An introduction to computer programming using the Visual Basic language.

An introduction to the browser-based bibliography program EndNote Web and its interaction with Microsoft Word to produce documents containing formatted reference citations. EndNote Web is a “lite” version of the stand-alone EndNote program. It is free to use to members of the University as part of the UL's subscription to the Web of Knowledge database of references.

The Computing Service also runs several termly introductory courses on EndNote Desktop and on more advanced use of EndNote Desktop.

EndNote Web enables you to search for relevant books and articles and store their citation details online. You can modify your copies of these references and add some notes. The program can later work as a “helper” application with Microsoft Word so that you can add consistently laid-out citations to a document that you are creating and create a sorted bibliography at its end.

EndNote Web does not provide advanced features such as customisation of output formats (styles) , these are only available with EndNote for Bibliographies

This follows on from the Introduction to HTML and is a practical-based course.

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 two-part course will build on the simple style sheets produced in the introductory courses. The aim is to give you a full appreciation of how stylesheets work and how to work with them, and using them as an integral part of producing web pages and sites.

Macromedia Dreamweaver is a powerful web creation tool that allows non-technical people to produce professional websites. This course provides a practical introduction for those that wish to use Dreamweaver to create web-pages and manage websites. It focuses on building a small website.

This is a practical-based course for people new to writing Web pages. Only the basics of HTML (hypertext markup language) will be covered, but there are other courses for those wishing to extend their knowledge. By the end of the course participants will have created three personal linked web pages.

The rendering time for web pages is dominated by the graphics on the page. This course teaches methods of preparing graphics so minimise information loss and maximise transfer and rendering efficiency. There is an opportuinity to try the methods using PhotoShop.

This course will introduce so-called web2.0 technologies, which are loosely centred around the push towards social networking. It will show how you are probably already participating and what else you might be interested in trying out.