Tech Tips – Page 32

Updating Emergency Contacts in my.SMU

If you haven’t recently, it’s a good time to update your emergency contacts in my.SMU.

Faculty & Staff Instructions

From the landing page, select Personal Information located under Employee Self – Service.
Click on Emergency Contacts.
Click Add Emergency Contact.
Enter the Contact Name.
Indicate the Relationship to Employee. If the employee has the same address or telephone select one of the following options:If you indicated that the emergency contact address or phone is the same as yours it will display on the screen and can be edited if needed.
If the contact has a different address select Edit Address to provide address information.
If the contact has a different phone select Add Phone Number and indicate the Phone Type and Phone Number.
Click Save. To view a contact list select the Return to Emergency Contacts link.
For multiple contacts check one to be the Primary Contact.
Edit or Delete contacts by selecting the appropriate icons.
Click Save.

Student Instructions

Visit the Update/Verify Personal Info section of the Student Self-Service tutorial: sites.smu.edu/oit/training/story/studentselfservice/story.html.

The Stress-Free Way of Finding a Job

Graduation season is approaching, and for many graduates, while their academic career closes, their professional career is slowly opening its doors. That in itself is extremely stressful – but it doesn’t have to be.

Introducing: LinkedIn.

If you haven’t yet heard of this precious gift, LinkedIn is a professional social-networking
site for creating connections (or “links”) between working professionals, including prospective employees with their desired employers, for example. These connections can occur at numerous levels. While we’ll explore its options in a bit, in layman’s term, it’s a Facebook for professionals, with over 187 million unique visitors per month.

To best describe how LinkedIn works, let’s use this scenario:

You log into LinkedIn and created a profile. This profile is extremely intricate, asking for information regarding education, volunteerism, employment history, honors/awards, projects, skills, interests, etc. You can also upload professional works, such as research papers, artwork, etc.

Once you fill this in (it can take a while), you would then upload a profile photo and launch their customized page, available for other LinkedIn users to see, include friends and prospective employers. However, LinkedIn offers many customization settings, one of them being security, so that you would be able to control how his/her profile is viewed.

Your new profile page essentially serves as a modern, online resume. Deviating from the traditional paper-style resumes, LinkedIn offers you the ability to use this page as a showcase of your abilities and achievements. In fact, many employers will search LinkedIn for candidates, making their profiles the first thing that employers see. As you grow and gain more experience, you’ll start creating “connections,” that is, “friending” working professionals you know on the website. In essence, they serve as your virtual network, being able to endorse you for skills you may have specified, or refer your profile for employment.

How to get started

LinkedIn is such a thorough service that no blog post can truly, comprehensively cover its values and services. Instead, click over to www.linkedin.com and peruse the site, search for profiles, and see if LinkedIn can help you grow in an online, professional setting.

More resources

Thankfully, many online and in-person resources are available for your utilization to make you an efficient LinkedIn user:

The first is a set of eight only tutorials to get started with LinkedIn, available here.

The second, if you are an SMU student, is to visit the Hegi Family Career Development
Center during their drop-in hours. There, experts can guide you to creating and maintaining an exemplary profile, as well as offer other quintessential services for starting your professional career.

And lastly, visit with someone who has a profile already, including, perhaps, your professor! See how they use LinkedIn and what the service has offered them.

Try out LinkedIn today – it may just land you your next job.

P.S. For some fast facts about LinkedIn, click here.

Get it Together: Conquering the To-Do List

As finals quickly approach, it can be a real pain to keep all of your tasks, both personal and school-related, organized and on their way to completion. Sometimes, things fall through the cracks and throw your life into chaos.

Everyone has their own methods of managing their tasks, but if your methods don’t seem to be cutting it for your needs, you may want to switch it up with some digital methods!

A very common way to keep it all together is to have a to-do list. For ages this has been done with pen/pencil and paper. But what happens if you lose your list or it gets destroyed by an eager and hungry canine? All that work is gone! For online storage and syncing of your to-do list, there are loads of awesome tools for you to try.

My personal favorite has been Wunderlist. Wunderlist is a free to-do list platform (with a premium pay service available) that makes creating your to-do list and syncing it with all of your devices painless. With apps for not only your computer but also your smartphones and tablets, your tasks are only a couple of taps or clicks away! On top of that, it has a satisfying “DING!” when you finally check those tasks off of your list!

Wunderlist is available for iPhone, Android, Kindle Tablets (FireOS), Windows, and Mac.

Some other great services include Remember the Milk, which has apps for most mobile platforms as well as the ability to connect to your Google and Evernote accounts. Speaking of Evernote, it can also be a great way to keep a to do list on top of its stellar note-taking capabilities.

Another good option for a to-do list across all of your devices is Todoist. Also free with a premium pay option available, Todoist has apps and clients that are available on fifteen different platforms! Todoist would probably work best if you’re more business-oriented, since it also includes a lot of team collaboration features that aren’t found in other services.

Apart from finding the best to-do list service for your needs, another important part of managing your tasks is to get into a routine and stick with it! You’ll be surprised how much more work you can get done.

The New Apple Watch

By: Kristina Harris

With the launch of Apple Watch pre-sales, we decided to put together a table to compare and contrast the new technology and two of its biggest competitors, Google’s Android Wear Gear Live and Samsung’s Gear S.

Click below to see an enlarged image:

Things to consider

Apple Watches have music playback, but without a headphone jack, Bluetooth headphones must be used.
There are 38 different ways to customize the Apple Watch while for Samsung’s Gear S, you can only choose between white and black.
“Digital Touch”, which includes features such as sending your heartbeat and hand-drawn sketches to other smartwatch users, is exclusive to the Apple Watch.
The Apple Watch has 8GB of storage compared to the Gear S and Gear Live’s 4GB, but only 2GB and 75MB of storage is able to be used.
While the Apple Watch has great reviews so far, the biggest complaint is the battery life, with 18 hours being the least amount of time of life amongst all smartwatches.
If you noticed the $17,000 price tag on the Apple Watch, don’t fret. This is only for the version that comes with the 18-Karat Yellow Gold Case and a Gold Buckle.

After hours of research, here is my advice. Apple gives its products well-needed improvements as the months go on. If you do not want to be stuck in the early adopter phase, wait for them to fix the kinks that new technology inevitably has, or even wait until the next version. Many critics said the interface is comparatively difficult to use, so if you are newly interested in giving smartwatches a go, you might start off with a more established product like the Pebble to see if a smartwatch meets your lifestyle needs. If you’re absolutely loving it, consider the admittedly charming Apple Watch or one of its competitors. One thing is for sure: this is one device that does not deserve to be abandoned in the back of your junk drawer.

Save Your Voice for the Presentation

By: Shayan Gaziani

Imagine this Scenario:

You walk into class prepared to deliver a paramount presentation. You’ve spent hours rehearsing every aspect from timing to delivery. You’ve spent days, if not weeks, preparing the file, compiling countless amounts of slides, graphics, links, and embedded objects.

Approaching the classroom computer, you plug in your thumb drive and open the presentation file. You steady yourself, take a gulp of air, start the presenter view and – notice that every single piece of image, audio, and video is gone. Blank. Nada.

Arguably one of the most venerated of presentation software, Microsoft’s PowerPoint provides a robust, feature-rich, and professional aid to presenters across a variety of disciplines and environments. From the boardroom to the classroom, PowerPoint has proven its usefulness and importance as a de facto method to revolutionizing the way we deliver speeches, presentations, assignments, etc.

But what if it doesn’t Work?

One common, yet egregious, issue with PowerPoint, especially in versions pre-dating 2013, is media and custom fonts not displaying correctly when a presentation file is transferred to another computer. The seemingly logical approach is to download images, sounds, and videos to your computer and simply insert them into a presentation. When you save and transfer the file, everything should clone and transfer as is, right?

Not exactly.

PowerPoint is big on trying to keep file sizes small and compressed, and one of the ways it does that is by linking media objects in a presentation. Remember that video you inserted into PowerPoint? It’s not really in the presentation file – rather a link to it is that PowerPoint then pulls when presenting.

Fortunately, there is an easy fix to this. Most PowerPoint versions include an option called Package for CD (On Mac, the issue can be circumvented by simply saving as a PowerPoint Show [.ppsx] format – you won’t get the viewer mentioned below, though). The feature allows the creator to compile all of the resources that PowerPoint has used to create the presentation (including your media), and create a packaged folder, including a mobile version of PowerPoint, called PowerPoint viewer, to ensure your presentation can run on a computer that does not have PowerPoint Installed. The Package for CD option allows you to create a presentation CD, or simply save the packaged files on a drive.

The Fix.

The steps to accomplish this are fairly simple, as provided by Microsoft. Go ahead and give it a try – it may just save your grade.