Software News Daily » tutorials

Atomic Training – Award Winning E-Learning Solutions

Kyle — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 20:27:27 +0000

Learning to use a software application can sometimes seem like an overwhelming task. Some people spend years learning the ins and outs of the various software suites required for their profession. Well, we have some good news: learning how to use your software doesn’t have to be a time-intensive, mind-bending endeavor.

Atomic Training has been providing high-quality, award-winning e-learning solutions for more than a decade to over 16 million users in 45 countries. With Atomic Training’s online Help Desk Solution, your company can reduce training costs and enhance employee productivity. Atomic Training’s fully integrated online training platform provides an easy-to-use search interface allowing employees to quickly find answers to their software questions.

No matter what industry your company is in, Atomic Training has software tutorials to meet your training needs. Some companies, such as graphic design firms or those with graphics-intensive creative departments, will benefit from products such as Adobe Creative Suite Training, wherein users will learn to utilize the full range of features and tools for such programs as Flash Professional, InDesign, Dreameweaver and Photoshop. Companies with a predominantly (or entirely) Macintosh workflow will greatly benefit from Mac OS X Training, while a corporate office environment may find Microsoft Office Training to be the most useful. Whatever your training needs, Atomic Training has the know-how and tutorial resources to meet them.

Many companies employ multiple departments, each with their own software and training needs. For those who require access to training for multiple software applications, the Atomic Training All-Access Subscription is probably the best option.

With the Atomic Training All-Access Pass, your employees gain access to Atomic Training’s entire tutorial library, with unlimited 24/7 availability. With more than 50 thousand software tutorial lessons for such industry standards as Microsoft Office, Skype, Google Services, Adobe Creative Suites, Dragon NaturallySpeaking, AutoCAD, your employees can find the exact training they need, on demand. Don’t let software slow your company down. Provide the right kind of training today.

Microsoft Word 2010 Ribbon Tutorial

Kyle — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 14:30:06 +0000

In this Microsoft Word 2010 tutorial, Kyle gives us an introductory look at the “Ribbon” that has replaced the traditional toolbar in Microsoft Office.

Video Transcript

Hello and welcome back to SoftwareMedia TV. My name is Kyle, and today I’m going to be taking you through a quick, introductory look at Microsoft Word.

One of the biggest changes that you’re going to notice between Word 2003 and Word 2010 is what’s called the “Ribbon.” Now, instead of having drop-down menus like file, edit, window… you’re going to have various tabs that include all of your formatting and tools, right here for quick access.

So, first of all, is the File tab. This is where you’re going to do all of your saving, opening of documents, closing, info, recent documents that you’ve worked on, creating new documents, printing, and your help option is in here, too.

Next, you’ve got your Home tab. This is probably the most commonly used tab. It incorporates all of the text formatting. So all of your fonts, font sizes, text format, strike-throughs, changing the sizes, colors, paragraph formatting… everything like that is going to be here on the Home tab.

Next, you have got the Insert tab. This is where you are going to put in your pictures… that’s my dog Riley. This is where you can insert pictures, clip art, hyperlinks, bookmarks, cross-referencing, headers, footers… everything like that will be done in the Insert tab.

Then, you’ve got Page Layout. This is where you can put in page colors. You can adjust the margins, page orientation (whether it’s landscape or portrait), page size, columns, line breaks, watermarks. Everything is done in the Page Layout tab.

Then References. You can add text, update tables, table of contents, you can insert footnotes and endnotes, insert captions, insert your citations and bibliography, all in the References tab.

Then you have your Mailings tab. Now this tab helps you to create documents when sending out mailings like printing out envelopes, labels, processing mail merges. You can set your recipients. You can do it all through Outlook as well.

Next you’ve got your Review tab. This is where you’re going to find SpellCheck, researching, word count, translating… it’s really cool that you can translate right here in Word, and not have to copy and paste into Google Translate.

And then you’ve got your View tab, which is where you’re going to change the way you’re looking at your document. You can zoom in and out, you can set it to one or two pages, you can adjust your page width, you can open new windows, you can set macros. This is all done in View.

So, that is the Ribbon in Microsoft Word 2010. In our next tutorial we are going to look at getting started, so stay tuned here at SoftwareMedia.com

How To Create a Custom Brush in Adobe Photoshop – 60 Second Tutorial

Kyle — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 15:33:48 +0000

Time again for another 60 second tutorial from the guys (and gals) here at SoftwareNewsDaily and SoftwareMedia.com. In this tutorial, Kyle -our resident multimedia wizard- will show you how to create a custom brush in Adobe Photoshop CS5 in less than one minute.

Video Transcript
Kyle here again from SoftwareMedia TV. Last time I showed you how to create a custom brush in Illustrator, and today I am going show you how to do the same thing in Photoshop.

What you want to do is you want to start with an image. It can be an image you import into Photoshop or something you draw. I’m going to do a little squiggly line.

Then, using any selection tool (it can be anything… it can be the magic wand, the lasso or the marquee, it doesn’t matter) select your image.

Go to edit > define brush preset. And you can name it whatever you want. I am going to call it “SoftwareMedia TV.” Hit “Enter” and it will show up in your brush presets. Deselect, and grab the paintbrush tool, and here’s your brush.

You can edit the parameters by going into the brush panel, and you can add noise, smoothing, anything you want, it’s really all up to you. You can do whatever you want with this brush.

It’s a really awesome tool, so go forth and experiment.

Create Custom Brushes in Adobe Illustrator – 60 Second Tutorial

Kyle — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 16:07:24 +0000

Time again for another of our 60 Second Tutorials. In this tutorial, Kyle shows us how to create a custom brush in Adobe Illustrator. Considering that Halloween is right around the corner, he decided to fashion his custom brush in the likeness of the sleeping, eldritch horror, dread Cthulhu.

Video Transcript

Hey everybody, Kyle here again from SoftwareMedia TV. Today, I’m going to show you how to make a custom brush in Adobe Illustrator.

So, what you want to do first is you want to select any one of these tools and make a shape of any kind. In the spirit of Halloween, I am going to make a Cthulhu shape, and that is going to be our brush.

Alright, draw a little octopus head, some eyes, wings… there you go.

And then, while you have your shape selected, go over to your brush palette , select “new brush”, “art brush”. And there’s a bunch of parameters here that you can change to get your brush exactly how you want it. Once you have everything selected, hit “ok”.

We can just delete this.

Go over to our paintbrush tool, make sure you’ve got your custom brush selected… and there you go. You have a brand-new, scary Cthulhu brush.

Ia Cthulhu.

Happy halloween, from SoftwareMedia.com

Premiere Pro Audio Cleanup – 60 Second Tutorial

Kyle — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 16:25:58 +0000

Audio is one of the key components to good quality video, and let’s face it, the built-in microphones in most consumer (and many professional) video cameras are somewhere between crap and garbage. While this problem can usually be avoided by using an external lapel or shotgun microphone, not everyone has access to the equipment, and many consumer cameras do not support external inputs.

In this Adobe Premiere Pro tutorial, I will show you how to clean the hiss and noise from the audio in your Premiere project, by using the integration with Adobe Soundbooth (both are included in the Production Premium and Master Collection).

Video Transcript:

Hey everybody, and welcome to SoftwarMedia TV. My name is Kyle and today I’m going to show you how to use Adobe Soundbooth to reduce the noise in your Premiere Pro project.

So, what you want to do is you want to right-click here. Go to “Edit in Adobe Soundbooth,” “Render and Replace.” This will open up Soundbooth, and it will have your clip in it to edit.

You can hear that.

So what you want to do is you want to highlight your noise, go to “Processes,” “Capture Noise Print”.

Now you want to right-click, go to “Processes” again, “Reduce Noise”.

Make sure that “Use captured noise print” is selected. You can see that it’s already reducing that frequency, and you can mess with the levels here a bit, to get it how you want it.

Hit… save it.

You can X out, go right back into Premiere Pro and your audio is cleaned up.

And it’s that easy.

Corel Painter 12 Mirror Painting – 60 Second Tutorial

Kyle — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 18:00:36 +0000

Corel Painter has long been known as the premier graphics software for realistic painting and illustration. Kyle, the resident animator and video geek here at SoftwareNewsDaily, has long been an unapologetic Corel Painter fanboy, and he has taken a little bit of time to show us the Mirror Painting Tool, one of the amazing new features available in Corel Painter 12.

Oracle Primavera P6 Tutorial

Justin — Thu, 05 May 2011 22:13:21 +0000

The Oracle Primavera P6 Project Management module is comprehensive, scalable, multi- project planning and control software, built on Oracle or Microsoft SQL databases for organization-wide project management. Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management is an integrated project portfolio management (PPM) solution comprising role-specific functionality to satisfy each team member’s needs, responsibilities and skills. The Primavera P6 suite uses a standard windows interface, client/server architecture, web-enabled technology, and a stand-alone or network-based database. It provides a single solution for managing projects of any size, adapts to various levels of complexities within a project, and intelligently scales to meet the needs of various roles.

The components and features of Primavera P6 are discussed in this tutorial with appropriate screenshots.

1. Starting the Project Management module

Click Start (in windows), then choose All Programs – Oracle – Primavera P6 – Project Management. Log in by entering valid login name and password.

Log in:

Before using the module, you must enter a valid login name and password.

Use the optional welcome dialog box to create a new project, open an existing project, open the last opened project, or open only global data (EPS, projects, roles, resources, calendars, etc.).

Selecting and modifying a portfolio:

Select a portfolio to view a group of projects that have common characteristics. A portfolio can contain any number of projects. Choose File – Select Project Portfolio. Select a portfolio. Use the Project Portfolios dialog box to view and change general information about the selected portfolio. You can also add and delete portfolios. Choose Enterprise – Project Portfolios to set up project portfolios. The top portion of the Project Portfolios dialog box contains information about all available portfolios, and the lower portion is divided into two tabs that display specific information about a selected portfolio.

Portfolio Screenshot

2. The Work Space

As you first open a project, the Home workspace displays the main functions available in the module. For instance, click Activities to focus on activity data and customize layouts. The workspace for each main window consists of a menu bar, navigation bar, directory bar, toolbar, and command bar. Use the toolbar to quickly access options that pertain to the window displayed and to change the look of your layout.

The directory & navigation bar:

Use the directory to display windows quickly. Choose View – Toolbars – Directory, to display or hide the directory bar. To display or hide directory bar button text, choose View – Toolbars and Directory Button Text.

Navigation bar Screenshots – Enterprise level

Navigation bar Screenshots – Project level

Navigation bar Screenshots - Project level

Similarly, use the navigation bar to move between open windows. You can also use the navigation bar to display and hide the directory and open Help for the current window or dialog box.

3. Layouts & Activities:

A layout is a customizable view of the project information. To customize a layout, you can choose from a wide range of project information, columns, colors, fonts and activity groupings and you can display these data in the top or bottom layouts. Each time you change the way data is presented in the top and bottom layouts, you create a unique layout. The module automatically prompts you to save a layout when you close it. To open a layout, click the Layout Options bar and choose Show on Top/Show on Bottom, then select the layout type. Within this layout you can define the things such as the Activity ID & Name, activity type, duration type and activity calendar.

In the sample layout below, you can view your project data based on the project’s work breakdown structure (WBS).

Activities are the central elements of work of a project. They are the lowest level of a work breakdown structure (WBS) and, as such, are the smallest entity of a project that directly concerns the module. If you divide activities into various steps, an activity’s primary resource is typically responsible for managing and tracking the progress of these steps, while the project manager is typically responsible for managing and tracking the progress of the overall activity.

The sample layout - Screenshot shows activity data in a Gantt Chart

Use the Activities window to create, view, and modify activities for the open project. The Activities window can be divided into upper and lower layouts. Activities represent work that must take place in a determined amount of time. Use the Activity Table or Activity Network layouts to add activities and build your projects. Customize the layouts to suit your requirements. Choose Project – Activities, to display the Activities window.

Gantt Chart provides a graphical display of activity progress over the course of the project. You can customize Gantt Chart bars, colors, labels, and symbols. Activity Usage Spreadsheet displays units, costs, or earned value data by activity over time. Use this type of layout to review per period and rolled up activity resource/cost data. The Activity Usage Spreadsheet is displayed in the top and bottom layouts.

To add an activity to a project, use the Activity Table and Gantt Chart, or Activity Network. According to your user preferences, the New Activity wizard may start to help you add an activity. To add an activity, select an activity within the group to which you want to add a new activity, then click Add. The new activity is placed according to the sorting options selected for the layout.

Re-numbering Activity ID - Screenshot

After Activity IDs are established, sometimes you may need to renumber them. For instance, if a project changes in scope, you are supposed to renumber selected Activity IDs to reflect a new sequence. To keep a project’s activities in synchronous with its baselines, when you renumber Activity IDs in the current project, you may also apply the renumbering to Activity IDs in all of its baselines.

Summary:

Thus, this tutorial introduces key concepts of Oracle Primavera P6 and explains the basic tasks such as selecting & modifying a portfolio, functions of workspace and the details of layouts & activities.

Thanks to Satish, one of our contributing writers, for this great tutorial.

Adobe Premiere Pro Tutorial – Learn How to Chroma Key

Kyle — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 21:41:52 +0000

Chroma keying (using a green screen to superimpose an actor onto a background) is one of the most often used and -at one time- difficult digital effects to execute well. Achieving a professional-quality key used to require countless hours of tedious, detail-intensive work. Now, Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 has an awesome tool called the Ultra Keyer which makes chroma keying easier and faster than ever. In fact, it sort of makes me wish that I didn’t spend $60,000 for 4 years of film school and just shelled out a few hundred bucks for Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 and a video tutorial program like Total Training for Premiere Pro. At any rate, I have put together an Adobe Premiere Pro tutorial video to help you learn how to chroma key, and begin your journey on the path to becoming a special effects Jedi… er editor.

Whether you think the old-school Muppets still look better than Jar-Jar, digital effects and computer generated imaging have become a staple in the modern film industry and the fact remains that computer imaging and effects are here to stay. However, despite the sad reality of the decline of Hensonesque animatronics and puppetry (Disney Corp. actually bought out the Jim Henson Creature Shop), there still exists a rich and interesting world of cinematic opportunity to explore, and digital effects are not nearly as difficult as many would have you believe.

Hands on With Word 2010 [VIDEO]

Brian — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 14:36:26 +0000

If you have been following our Hands on With Office 2010 series, then you already know about some of the great new features in Office 2010. Today we take you one step further in Office as we show you how to use all the great new features. Check out the video below to find out about some of the new tools in Word 2010.

Word 2010 (Full Product, PC)

Prices start at

$115.99

Avg user rating

0 user reviews

Merchant

Price

Rating

$115.99

413 Reviews

$117.78

1892 Reviews

$119.94

2803 Reviews

$119.99

25223 Reviews

$121.74

3695 Reviews

Prices and availability are subject to change by merchant without notice. Please check with merchant for details. For all prices or availability click here

Get Started in Adobe After Effects in Less Than 10 Minutes [Video]

Brian — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 17:32:29 +0000

We created this video tutorial for those of you who are either familiar with Adobe’s Creative Suite products, or linear editing programs such as Final Cut Pro, or Vegas. We focused on features that are specific to After Effects to get you animating right when you start using the program. Purchase After Effects CS5 today, and start taking advantage of all it’s great animation and effect features. With our tutorial, and the great software you will be creating amazing animations, and using pro level effects in no time!

After Effects CS5-Full-Commercial-Windows