GreerMUG October 2006 Meeting Highlights

Opening Moments

Kicking off the show was an awesome opening from Matt that was done entirely in iMovie!!! Whoa!! Way to go Matt!

Member Dock

You can fill out questions, make requests for presentations, and pick up the latest copies of the newsletter at the Member Dock. Member Dock also has reminders on it of some of the member perks available to us from different vendors. We also post these member perks on the website. Perks include things like discount coupons! The discount codes, however, are not listed on the website so that we can reserve this benefit for members. Contact Matt when you need one of these codes.

New website! Bill Harrison will be keeping up with the website on a regular basis. Eventually the website may have a members only section so we can have a place where things like member perks can be accessed online. Website address is still GreerMUG.com.

Matt also reminded us that our Website is linked to Tim's blog which is an awesome resource for keeping up with news in the Mac community.

Matt also talked about our purpose statement (also on the website). User groups fillled a different role 30 years ago before the internet. Now, people can get help online and so they need the traditional user group less. We want GreerMUG to offer a sense of community that can't be found online, as well as offering focused content and substance that is of interest to the group.

Thanks to those who continue helping with our re-cycling fundraising efforts. Matt's call to all: get involved!

Summer Photo Contest Winners

Tim passed around the two winning photos from our Photo contest. Another reason for being at the meetings - getting to see the creations of group members first hand! Both winners were here tonight.

The little bird in the birdhouse photo was by Carol McKinney. And the leaning sword photo was taken by Chuck Fountain, taken while he was at a Civil War re-enactment in Georgia.

Congratulations Carol and Chuck!! Both win an Apple note-taking, script-stashing tablet - Ah, very rare, precious thing. Only from Apple.
AND, they each receive a 25 dollar gift certificate to Wolf Camera! Woo-hoo!

Core Presentation

Tonight's Core Presentation is brought to us by Dick Palmer with iPlace. He is an expert on Pages. We also asked Dick to tell us a little about iPlace and what all they do here.

iPlace was started by Patrick Hyde. Patrick has been messing with Macs since high school. In 1989 he started Eclipse Technology. Eclipse serviced a lot of high end accounts. But they didn't have a way to take care of all their customers' retail needs, so this year they opened up iPlace as a store front so folks could have a great Apple retail experience. Plus a great service department, too.

iPlace carries everything Apple produces. iPlace services all Apple hardware except iPods - that's reserved by Apple.

iPlace is open to your suggestions and comments as well.

How many of you use Pages (almost half).
Any bad experiences with Pages (just Matt, but it was a Pages version 1 issue). Now Pages 2 is here!
Any current projects that are stumping us? (no.)
Anybody do newsletters? (several.)
Word processors? (letters, reports.)

Those are some of the things Pages does exceptionally well.

Here we go: Start Pages, and you get a list of templates to choose from. Templates will help get you half-way there!
You can add your own templates, too. (Dick will try to create templates for us if we bring him samples of what we want.)
Dick starts by choosing Busines Letter., no make that Newsletter.

A template consists of a predetermined layout with placeholders that require you to replace their text with your text. Or their photos with your photos. Or ... well, you get the idea. Replace, replace, replace, and Poof! You're almost done. Dick says, disect these and take them apart and you can see how templates work.

On with the demo: go to the Public folder for user rapalmer and connect - Dick has a folder for us called Greer Pages. Download that. Open a new doc and pick Stationery newsletter. Those placeholders we mentioned - they're filled with fake latin. How do we know it's fake?

Now go to Address book and import a vcard (Dick has some fake contacts for us to use in our class demonstration.) The point is that Pages can use infomation from your Address Book - isn't that just like a Mac!! Did you know you can drag contact info (like the name) from Address book all the way over into Pages and the placeholder updates itself. Placeholder data fields have names that are mapped to certain Address Book fields.

Let's start with a Blank template. Insert - Choose and then select the folder we just downloaded. American Plain is an 18 page doc of text. Tip-within-a-Core: Command-Shift-I will turn on/off those normally hidden characters like spaces and paragraph markers.

Option key while you open iPhoto - let's you choose an iPhoto library!!! Whoa! Theres a Pages class folder in the folder we downloaded. It goes with the text.

This next thing wows folks the most: drag a photo from iPhoto into Pages. resize it and move it around. PC users can't believe you can do this so effortlessly! Text automatically re-flows around your photos.

Now choose View - Styles Drawer. Here we have some pre-defined styles. Cursor into words and choose styles to apply them. Again, very effortless.

Select a block of text and apply bullets. Poof. After applying styles to all our headings, we want a Table of Contents - hmmm, how hard would that be? Place your insertion point at the top of your doc. Go to Insert and choose Table of Contents. Wowo! Is that powerful or what? Page numbers, too, Shrek? Yes, Donkey, page numbers, too.

What about Tables?

Choose Insert - Table. Pages inserts a starter table with a row for column headings. The Table Inspector lets you add columns, rows, etc. Did you know you can also do arithmetic in a Pages Table? Oh, yes. It's like a mini-spreadsheet. Dick demonstrates this with fruit (Hey, it is an Apple store.). Hit the equals sign from within a block and wham! a formiula editor pops up! The Equals sign is dynamic - it's like, it knows what you want to do. A lot of formatting is available here for spreadsheet-like functionality.

Anyone do equations? Go to Grapher in the Utilities folder. It has an equation palette. Build the equation, copy that, and then go to Pages, and then paste it - now you can include equations in your documents. Create scientific documents. Plot it with Grapher and include that as well!

Questions and Answers

Are these files compatible with Word? Yes, export it as a Word doc.

Is that Table of Contents dynamic? Yes!! Change one of your headings and see!

What if they discontinue Appleworks - some of us got a lot of stuff in there. Docs can go into Pages, but not databases... yet.


Thanks, Dick, for a GREAT Core Presentation! For that, Tim gets another Shameless Plug for his blog:

SHAMELESS PLUG ALERT!

Has he no shame? Will these plug's ever stop? Check out Tim's blog at TimothyGodby.com. A cool Mac blog - it's coolness begs for your interaction. Release your inner refrigerator poet, um, in a blog kind of way. Yeah, that's what I'm trying to say.

Give-away

Tonight's give-away is a copy of iLife '06. Our winner is Jackie Dolby.

Wrap-up

As always, we appreciate the guys at iPlace for allowing us to meet there. Next month our meeting will be on November 14th and we'll learn about the Delicious Library.