Maki & Brian DeLaet EduCyber founders

December 2003 EduNotes

Season's Greetings from EduCyber . We are pleased to present the December 2003 Edition of EduNotes . In this month's issue you can read about the new Office 2003 from Microsoft, do some froogle Christmas shopping, learn a bit about some digital cameras and compare prices on some of our favorite items. Enjoy and as always, send feedback to edunotes@educyber.com .

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Office 2003

No matter what Office Suite you use (Lotus, StarOffice or Microsoft Office), you'll want to give Microsoft's latest Office release a closer look. First impressions are important with software as with life. My first impression of Office 2003 was “Oh, same format with a new color scheme”.
OK, it's actually a bit more than a color scheme. The tool bars are beveled and shaded and look pretty cool. But users of previous MS Office products will find the old familiar toolbars and the buttons are all in the same places. This may seem like a small thing at first but it is important. Nothing is more annoying than to have to re-learn where the correct button is and what it looks like. There's none of that with Office 2003. The menus and toolbars are all right there.
So why upgrade / switch? First there's the task pane that first came out with Office XP and has been improved upon in 2003. The task pane lives on the right side of the screen and puts you quickly in touch with key tasks like opening recently used documents or links to go online for updates or help. Certain other tasks take over this pane if requested as well. Click on File and then New and the task pane will help you start a new document whether you're thinking of a simple Word document, a web page, an XML document, an email message, or using some other template. Inserting clipart works from the task pane as well which is considerably nicer than having a window over top of your document. Help works from the task pane as well.
Office 2003 has clearly been developed with the Internet in mind and many of the new features are related to Internet technologies. The default or home page view of the task pane has hyperlinks to the Microsoft office web site. Sounds simple enough but using the Office online links can connect you to hundreds of resources from clipart to templates that can save you having to recreate the wheel. Think of a business task from creating an invoice to creating a tri-fold brochure to building a web site and there are templates available to help you get started. The XML support is another indication of the Internet technology leanings and without starting a whole other article on what XML is and what you can do with it, let's just say such support is becoming a must for any application.
But the real reason Office 2003 deserves a closer look is Outlook. It took only a few minutes for me to be completely sold on this latest version of Microsoft's email/ contact management/ calendaring/ task manager program. The new email view, while jarring in its difference from previous incarnations, is much easier and a whole lot more useful. Instead of the default setting of a shortcut bar (which I don't think anyone ever used) you get an Explorer type view on the left of all your folders. In addition there are some quick shortcuts to inbox and the new one that I really like is “Unread Mail”. Click on this “folder” and you see all unread messages no matter what folder they're in. If you rely on email like I do, this is extremely useful in seeing who's sending what without having to have it all come into your inbox and then sort from there. There are buttons at the bottom of this view to take you to your calendar, tasks or contacts with an easy click of the button.
Probably the best feature of all is the Junk email management. Even though my server has some filtering installed, the Junk email features of Outlook have already been trained to get about 90% of the junk that was sneaking past the server filters. I've been checking the junk box before emptying it and so far it hasn't snagged one legitimate mail but catches around 100 junk messages a day!
But the feature that got me hooked right away was the view of email. Instead of splitting the screen horizontally, it splits it vertically giving a narrower window for the list of messages and a wider window for the actual message being read. You can read more of a message with this view AND see more messages in whatever mail folder you have highlighted.
Now that we've got you interested though, the retail versions start at $400 for Office 2003 Standard Edition. If you're in a business environment and have a server and/or four or more workstations, you should be looking at the volume licensing program that best fits your needs.

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Digital Cameras

Whether you're holiday shopping (What? You're not done yet?) or trying to capture the best shot you can, ‘tis the season for camera shopping. What a difference a year makes! Prices are coming down and the quality continues to go up.
A very nice beginning camera can be had for as little as $130 and the price and quality go up from there. So what will $130 get you? How about a 2 Megapixel camera with a USB connector to your PC and a 16 MB card to store picture on? Not enough you say? Most also have the ability (yes, we're still talking about the $130 versions) to take short motion or videos as well.
We still recommend avoiding Olympus because of battery drain problems we've been hearing about. The one we bought about two years ago had such bad problems that we can't use the video monitor on it or it drains the batteries in minute. There is also the time lag issue on Olympus as it waits too long to take a picture after you push the button. You keep missing the picture perfect moment. The reports we've read and seen say they still experience such problems. The Fujifilm Finepix cameras are pretty good and their low end A205 is in the $130 price range. I've been a Canon fan for years and their high end digital camera is one of the hotter models on the market. The 300D Rebel is a 6.3 Megapixel camera with all the bells and whistles a professional photographer (or at least a serious amateur photographer) could want. Prices for this beauty start at around $900 and that is just for the camera (lens not included). A variety of different Canon lenses can be attached which is what makes this such a versatile product. This camera is definitely on our Christmas list this year.
There is a wide range of cameras available between these two and the sweet spot appears to be at about the $350 - $400 range where the cool features, maximum number of pixels and price come together.

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Be a Froogle Shopper

If you are feeling frugal this year, you should check out Froogle, google.com's product search service. You didn't think the world's favorite search engine would leave you high and dry when it comes to shopping did you?
Just visit froogle.google.com to start your shopping experience. Though Google claims this service is still in Beta (as in not ready for release yet) they are advertising it from their main page and it can definitely come in handy this time of year.
As discussed above, Office 2003 Standard is a good program. On Froogle you find that the complete version can be had for as little as $383.93 from PC connection (at the time of this writing anyway). Or you can upgrade for $238.92 from Office Depot.
And the FinePix A205 mentioned above we now learn can be purchased for only $120 from the MP Superstore. Re-order these links by price from low to high and we find that for $109 we can purchase one from A&M PhotoWorld. There are also at least 182 different places I can purchase an A205 online and they are all linked right from Froogle.
In case you're still not impressed, we compared Froogle pricing on the camera to C-net's shopper.com and the best price we could find for the A205 was $115. And one of our favorite tech web sites is ZDnet. Their price comparison also lists $115 as the best price (but they also let you type in your zip code so they can estimate shipping and taxes for you which is pretty cool and Froogle doesn't do yet).
So if you're still working on your Christmas shopping visit Froogle to find the best price on just about anything you can buy.

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Price Checks:
15 inch LCD monitors: As low as $200 online (buyer beware). $300 in Denver area.
17 inch LCD monitors: As low as $330 online (buyer beware). $469 in Denver area.
256 MB of PC133 memory: $70 online. $69 in Denver Area.
256 MB of PC2100 memory: $70 online. $59 in Denver area.
80 GB IDE Hard Drive: $80 online. $119 in Denver area.

Call EduCyber (720 275 4646) to find out the best places to shop online or in the Denver metro area.

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