Lots of Broken Section Breaks

Though I've had experience with headers and footers previously due to English classes, the only experience with section and page breaks have been through my job in appraisal. Even with my job, my experiences with section breaks have been trial and error. In fact, a lot of my frustration while working in the past has been with section breaks as they are a common element of appraisal reports. Every time I would mess one up, I didn't have the knowledge of how to fix it. It would take a good half hour of me messing with it to truly fix what I was trying to do. Section breaks are a very useful tool with utilizing a 'Table of Contents' and if you use them incorrectly, the entire Table of Contents gets messed up. 

After going through Chapter 4, I can say the last few modules were the first modules in TestOut where I wasn't able to blow through easily. Though I found it annoying at first, I also realized that this was the first time using TestOut where I was actually learning things about Word. Not only was I learning, but these things are all extremely common in appraisal reports, such as Headers, Footers, Section/Page Breaks, Charts (one of the most common things in an appraisal report, though typically linked through Excel), and Formatting. I'm excited to finish up Word and get into Excel as I feel that is where I will not only start to learn a lot, but learn things that are very applicable to my career.

You Learn a New Office Feature Everyday

I have been using Microsoft Word and Excel since I was 9 years old. I still remember trying to hand in my essays in 5th grade on typed paper because my handwriting has always been bad. I also remember creating barebone projects on Excel such as keeping track of standings for my hockey teams. Due to me being introduced to Office products at an early age, I've learned a lot over the years. I especially have learned a lot about Word and Excel since starting my job in commercial appraisal. However, despite me learning a lot over the years, the one thing I've learned with Word and especially Excel, is how much I don't know. Over the past few years my dad has showed me his Word and Excel formats and showed me all his formula's on Excel and how he links the two files so they have the same brain. Typically after the first 10 or 15 minutes, it's my brain that starts spinning. 

However, there were two things I learned from Chapter 3 that I will definitely make use of for the future. Firstly, in Word I never found bookmarks to be useful, let alone know how to create them. After going through Chapter 3 I not only learned how to create bookmarks but found how useful they can be in my current career. In Excel, I learned the use of the "name box" and "named cells". I found out after this chapter that my dad has used these for years and I just never noticed, but now that I learned this I realize how big of a deal it is in my dads format. Nearly every single one of his formulas reference a named cell.

I'm looking forward to the end of Chapter 4 and learning about "macros".

Sharing is Caring

Much like Chapter 1, there wasn't a whole lot I learned in Chapter 2 with the exception of file sharing. I have never used file sharing with Windows before, and I doubt I ever will with things like Google Drive and Dropbox existing. However, much like setting up my raid system, I like the idea of having files interlinked through a network connection. Though file sharing seems to be outdated in the current world, I definitely see it's use. If Drive didn't exist, my fathers company would have to use file sharing in order to have a base of operations, otherwise we would be very disorganized. 

It is also interesting how you are able to map a drive using file sharing. It is much similar to my raid system, though I prefer the storage of my raid system as well as it's redundancy.

Data in the Clouds

Since my father started his new company, I've learned a lot about cloud computing in the past few months. Back in November, my father bought a raid system (with cloud support) and asked me to set it up. I originally thought it would be as easy as putting the hard drives in, and plugging it into an outlet... I was wrong. I spent a few hours researching different raid systems and the purpose of each. I knew my dad purchased the raid system with the intention of redundancy, but I also didn't want to limit the storage space too much, so I went with raid 1 which splits the system in half. The first half is the actual hard drive you save data to, and the second half is just a copy of the first half. After setting this up, I had to connect the system to the internet in order to gain it's cloud computing capabilities. After all of this was done, it was just a matter of copying data over to the raid system. 

Relating back to what I learned in 1.2.12, I used all the benefits associated with cloud computing. I also have the disadvantages associated with cloud computing, with the exception of cloud hosting outages. If my internet is down, it turns into a regular raid system and I can upload data manually if I have to.