[Stormkeeper]

Oh I remember that program. Touch-type or summat like that, wasn't it? The teacher made me help him teach.

[Androgeos Exeunt]

Yes, that's the one. Touch-Type or Touch-Typing.

I will admit that my dad bought a copy of Typing Instructor Deluxe a year before I started my first Touch-Typing lessons, and although I spent most of my time typing gibberish on Typing Instructor, a head-start is still a head-start, no matter how crappy it may be. When I did get serious, however, I could do an average of 16 WPM, which was about 5 to 8 WPM faster than my classmates. The fastest I went at that time was 19 WPM, and even then, I was still the slowest typist in my entire family! My dad, despite not a frequent user of computers, could do ~23 WPM, but my mum went as far as 49 WPM!

It's better now, though. I estimate that my current typing speed is about 25 to 30 WPM, and that's fine.

[S-99]

I didn't actually learn how to type until i was in 8th grade when i was 14 in 1999. It was an awesome computer class they offered. They taught keyboarding, ms publisher, ms excel, ms powerpoint, and ms word all in one class. Great class, the only reason i know my way around ms office actually.

I forget what the keyboarding software was called, but it had lots of keyboarding games. My favorite was the game where your racing against another car, and it'd give you hard words and stuff, the faster you typed them correctly the faster you went. It had really cool music too.

The fastest i could get to was 120wpm a year later in highschool. But, two random accidents involving both your index fingers going numb, my has keyboarding changed. Idk how fast i type anymore, but it's a good deal slower than my fully functional hand fastest. I even bought a keyboard smaller than the one on my 15 inch laptop to accomodate for my hands and the two extra fingers that must reach a little further. It's very possible to keyboard just fine without your index fingers.

[Stormkeeper]

Meh. I could do about 30 WPM then, slower than my mum by far, who's a certified typist and can fire away at 100 over, I think. It helped that I spent my early years typing 'power overwhelming', pretending that my units were invincible only in my base.

[Aardwolf]

A brief explanation:

The QWERTY layout was invented because people were typing too fast for typewriters to keep up. Before QWERTY, they had the most common letters (e, for example) on the home row (the one with the little dimples), and people typed faster and the typewriters were like "wtf screw you CRASSSHHHHHHHHHburnburnburn." Well now that computer keyboards don't have to worry about that, some people are switching to keyboard layouts where the fingers' rest position is on the more commonly used letters (like e).

[Androgeos Exeunt]

I learned how to use Microsoft Word and most of Microsoft PowerPoint on my own. All I had to do was to see my sister use it, then what I did was to "explore" the slightly finer bits of Word and PowerPoint. At the age of ten, when my classmates were doing about 100 to 400 KB presentations, mine was 1.43 MB. Come secondary school, when they finally manage to hit 1 MB, I was doing 50. Two years ago, as a Teachers' Day present, I cranked out a PowerPoint presentation that had so much stuff embedded into it, it took up 429 MB of disk space!

That's the biggest PowerPoint presentation I've ever done to date, and I believe I still have it somewhere. I highly doubt that any future PowerPoint presentations I do will go anywhere near that size again.

The biggest Word document I've ever done (which I'm still doing, in fact), is 37.5 MB, has about 147 960 characters in 30 401 words and 81 pages.

[Hellstryker]

I learned how to use Microsoft Word and most of Microsoft PowerPoint on my own. All I had to do was to see my sister use it, then what I did was to "explore" the slightly finer bits of Word and PowerPoint. At the age of ten, when my classmates were doing about 100 to 400 KB presentations, mine was 1.43 MB. Come secondary school, when they finally manage to hit 1 MB, I was doing 50. Two years ago, as a Teachers' Day present, I cranked out a PowerPoint presentation that had so much stuff embedded into it, it took up 429 MB of disk space!

That's the biggest PowerPoint presentation I've ever done to date, and I believe I still have it somewhere. I highly doubt that any future PowerPoint presentations I do will go anywhere near that size again.

The biggest Word document I've ever done (which I'm still doing, in fact), is 37.5 MB, has about 147 960 characters in 30 401 words and 81 pages.

Now I'm interested what the hell you put in that powerpoint...

[Dilmah G]

Sir, WHAT THE ****! do you put in your powerpoints and word docs?!

429 MB!!!!!! That's a lot of pwettyful pwictures

[Androgeos Exeunt]

Let me think...what I did was use PowerPoint 2000 with the following options:

Embed TrueType fonts
Embed system fonts
Embed objects smaller than 50,000 KB

There were about 15 to 20 slides, and I used the following three fonts:

Copperplate Gothic Light
Copperplate Gothic Bold
Unown™

Almost every slide has a separate background picture I made in Terragen and saved in BMP format at an image size of 1024 x 768 pixels. Each image embedded is about 1.2 MB in size.

Music is probably the biggest culprit. I embedded a WAV file into almost every single slide, and each file was between 1:30 to 4:30 in terms of run length. The smallest file was about 20 MB in size, and the largest, 45 MB.

[Dilmah G]

Let me think...what I did was use PowerPoint 2000 with the following options:

Embed TrueType fonts
Embed system fonts
Embed objects smaller than 50,000 KB

There were about 15 to 20 slides, and I used the following three fonts:

Copperplate Gothic Light
Copperplate Gothic Bold
Unown™

Almost every slide has a separate background picture I made in Terragen and saved in BMP format at an image size of 1024 x 768 pixels. Each image embedded is about 1.2 MB in size.

Music is probably the biggest culprit. I embedded a WAV file into almost every single slide, and each file was between 1:30 to 4:30 in terms of run length. The smallest file was about 20 MB in size, and the largest, 45 MB.

Wow

[Enigmatic Entity]

I didn't actually learn how to type until i was in 8th grade when i was 14 in 1999. It was an awesome computer class they offered. They taught keyboarding, ms publisher, ms excel, ms powerpoint, and ms word all in one class. Great class, the only reason i know my way around ms office actually.

I forget what the keyboarding software was called, but it had lots of keyboarding games. My favorite was the game where your racing against another car, and it'd give you hard words and stuff, the faster you typed them correctly the faster you went. It had really cool music too.

The fastest i could get to was 120wpm a year later in highschool. But, two random accidents involving both your index fingers going numb, my has keyboarding changed. Idk how fast i type anymore, but it's a good deal slower than my fully functional hand fastest. I even bought a keyboard smaller than the one on my 15 inch laptop to accomodate for my hands and the two extra fingers that must reach a little further. It's very possible to keyboard just fine without your index fingers.

Is that Mavis Beacon teaches typing I see? It has really crappy .gif images for its graphics. Does the guy flying the plane crash if you lose? That's like "Oh no, you lost the race, I'm going to kill myself (emo)....BOOM!".

[iamzack]

Mavis Beacon had a chameleon game also. I liked it best, I don't remember why. But Ido know I never did homerow keys. I type entirely with my left index and middle finger (but I only use the middle finger when pushing two keys on the left side in quick succession) and my right index and middle finger and my right thumb (for spacebar). Oh, and I us my right pinky for shift. It's much faster, but I can't type without looking for more than a few seconds at a time. But that's only ever useful when I'm typing up something that is on paper.

[Stormkeeper]

*snip*

Lol wut. My presentations have never hit so large.

[Commander Zane]

... I've never even heard of DVORAK. Regardless.

Neither have I until this thread appeared.

[Androgeos Exeunt]

Lol wut. My presentations have never hit so large.

There we go. My point proven.

[Goober5000]

I learned how to use Microsoft Word and most of Microsoft PowerPoint on my own. All I had to do was to see my sister use it, then what I did was to "explore" the slightly finer bits of Word and PowerPoint. At the age of ten, when my classmates were doing about 100 to 400 KB presentations, mine was 1.43 MB. Come secondary school, when they finally manage to hit 1 MB, I was doing 50. Two years ago, as a Teachers' Day present, I cranked out a PowerPoint presentation that had so much stuff embedded into it, it took up 429 MB of disk space!

That's the biggest PowerPoint presentation I've ever done to date, and I believe I still have it somewhere. I highly doubt that any future PowerPoint presentations I do will go anywhere near that size again.

I demand you upload this presentation for our evaluation.  It sounds far too good to be true.

[Commander Zane]

For me and one friend it was about making 15 - 30mb comics with Powerpoint using STICKMEN.

[Androgeos Exeunt]

I demand you upload this presentation for our evaluation.  It sounds far too good to be true.

Are you serious?

[Daniel P]

I demand you upload this presentation for our evaluation.  It sounds far too good to be true.

Are you serious?

Yes we are that serious.

[S-99]

Is that Mavis Beacon teaches typing I see? It has really crappy .gif images for its graphics. Does the guy flying the plane crash if you lose? That's like "Oh no, you lost the race, I'm going to kill myself (emo)....BOOM!".

Yes that was mavis beacon. Wierd name, but i enjoyed it a greatly.

I learned how to use Microsoft Word and most of Microsoft PowerPoint on my own. All I had to do was to see my sister use it, then what I did was to "explore" the slightly finer bits of Word and PowerPoint. At the age of ten, when my classmates were doing about 100 to 400 KB presentations, mine was 1.43 MB. Come secondary school, when they finally manage to hit 1 MB, I was doing 50. Two years ago, as a Teachers' Day present, I cranked out a PowerPoint presentation that had so much stuff embedded into it, it took up 429 MB of disk space!

That's the biggest PowerPoint presentation I've ever done to date, and I believe I still have it somewhere. I highly doubt that any future PowerPoint presentations I do will go anywhere near that size again.

My question is why?!!?! I stay away from powerpoint because it's retarded. In college i make all of my presentations just a series of png's (i used gimp because i had linux, you can also make a good looking presentation with mspaint). All OSes today come with image viewers that let you click a "next" button to go to your next slide or go into a slideshow mode so it works out great for me.

In powerpoint you can add fancy animations which only dumbs down the audience (oh this'll shock and awe them...details materializing into existence). I hate powerpoint, i've also found that many professors asking for only powerpoint presentations to be handed really didn't care that mine were just a series of png's in an image viewer on fullscreen mode. They thought my presentations were equally as good as powerpoint.

It's my belief that powerpoint presentations or similar only dumb people down and detract from the details being spoken. There is a way to give powerpoint presentations that is smart though. I saw one person who was talking about various places of the world. Her powerpoint presentation wasn't much, but it gave a great time for her to show a world map and point to locations on it with zoom in pictures in later slides pointing to where cities she was talking about were with some photos about what that place looked like. Make the audience interact with your powerpoint presentation and even interact with it yourself.

Mine was similar to hers except a little simpler. I would rather just gotten up there and talked. I did one about the black plague of 1347 with my series of png's There wasn't much i could do with it except make intriguing illustrations based on the many forms the black plague took when it was spread. These made the audience ask me more questions about how the black plague spread in its many forms. The funniest illustration i had was a big skull i found somewhere on the internet with green gasses coming from it blowing towards this stick man with an open mouth (showing how the airborne form spread). It was funny and awkward, but i really wanted to talk about the many ways the black plague was spread and also explain it visually as best as i could. Talking about the effects on society of the black plague back then with visual stimuli was a lot easier as i just grabbed pictures of artwork from that time period on the internet. I also had gotten a pointing rod that was 3 feet long (that my friends dubbed the spear of a spartan since we were testing our spear throwing abilities after we saw the movie) and i was pointing to the images and explaining them