Introducing Online Banking

Hello everybody. Today I will be talking about one of the most convenient things that Internet has brought to my daily life, which is Online Banking. Before I start, I want you to think back to the time when we all had to go to the bank to do things such as money transfer, bill payments, or checking your balance. Also, keep in mind that mostly everybody has no times going to the bank just to pay his credit card, or to see how much his current balance is. I agree that it would be a big problem for people who works at the office, where they have to start working before the bank opens and finish at the time the bank closes, and they would only have one or two days a week to go to the bank. So in this blog, I'll go deeper into this online banking system and its benefits.

Online Banking is an online system that allows users to make bill payments, transfer money, check the balance and bank statements, securely over the Internet. By using the  Username/ID as the number showing on your debit card and the password of your choice, you can log in to your online banking securely. For first time user, you will have to go through all the security steps to make sure that you are the rightful owner of the card. After going through all the steps, you will be asked to choose a password and a set of security questions / answers for yourself, in case somebody else wants to get access to your online banking. After that, you are all set and can start online banking right away. Nowadays, every bank in Canada has its own online banking, including Scotiabank, TD, BMO, RBC,...

Below are some examples of how online banking looks like at first sight for some Canadian banks:

BMO

Scotiabank

TD Canada Trust

Here are some of the advantages that online banking offers to its customers:

- Paying your bills online: you can simply go to Payments/Bills (depending on each bank) and pay for your payee. You can simply input the account number of the payee and it will show up in your online banking system.

- View your transactions: you can go into each account and see the transactions you have made on the card (deposit, withdraws, payments, etc.) 

- Transfer money: you can transfer money between your chequing and saving accounts by simply going to Transfer tab and follow the instructions.

- View your statement: you can not only see your bank statements but also registering for paperless statements, which will save lots of paper being thrown into the garbage bin each month.

- It's FREE

That is pretty much everything about online banking. If you have any concerns, please feel free to leave your comments :) Good night

Sources:

Caldwell, M. (n.d.). Three Advantages of online Banking. Retrieved from Money in Your 20s: http://moneyfor20s.about.com/od/financialinstitutions/tp/Online-Banking.htm

Introducing Microsoft PowerPoint

Hello everyone. Today, while I was working on a project that I will have to present this upcoming week, I was wondering "How would people do presentation without such wonderful application like this Microsoft PowerPoint?". I guess that they would have to read it off the paper, or memorize it their own way, which is boring. That's why in today's blog I'll be talking about PowerPoint and its awesome features, which gives the user his/her own creative ways to make a presentation become more convincing and attractive.

Microsoft PowerPoint, similarly to Word and Excel, is a Microsoft Office slide-based presentation software application that was made by the Microsoft Team. With the ability to contain words, numbers, movies, audio and pictures in the slides, PowerPoint provides the user with many different ways to catch their audience attention to the presentation. PowerPoint also offers flexibility and the ability to create a professional presentation with numerous techniques such as custom animations, sounds, transition, etc. 

As you can see, with PowerPoint, I could make my presentation become much more attractive and interesting by having a nice-looking background, a set of Bullets, a note for myself, an also an audio file that could record my voice and replay it anytime I want during the slideshow.

This is the exact same picture with the first picture I just uploaded, but it has an animation pane on the right side. This allows me to customize transition and animation to the slides the way I want it. With this animation pane, I can set delays between each animations, the order of which items will show up first and the timing of the animation. I can also set it so that it will automatically jump to the second item once the first one finishes animating without having to click at anything, which would make it look more professional.

That pretty much sums up this blog. If anyone is interested about what you can do with PowerPoint, please check out this article posted by Maruthappan on October 31, 2013 via this URL: http://listdose.com/top-10-tips-for-microsoft-powerpoint/.  That would help you a lot on making a better presentation. Thank you for your time reading my blog. 

Source: 

Maruthappan. (2013, October 31). Top 10 Tips for Microsoft PowerPoint. Retrieved from Listdose: http://listdose.com/top-10-tips-for-microsoft-powerpoint/

Introducing Microsoft Excel

Hello everybody. Today I'll be talking about the second Microsoft Office applications that has the second-most uses at school, office or at home, which is Microsoft Excel. If Microsoft Word is a word processor that lets the user do business letters, take notes,... then Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet software that lets user create tables, solve mathematical and statistical equations, create graph based on a specific set of data, etc.

Microsoft Excel has all the characteristics of a spreadsheet. It features a grid of cells that are listed by lettered columns and numbered rows. These rows and columns can contain any types of data, such as letters, numbers, currency, decimals, date, time, etc. Alternately, the user an also do calculation using the information put in and Excel's built-in functions, such as calculating the sum of a set of number, multiplication, subtraction, division, finding a maximum and/or minimum value, and so many more. On the other hand, Excel features visualization to the data by having a Graphing function that would create a bar chart, a pie chart, a column chart, a scattered chart,...

An overview of Microsoft Excel

Examples of Microsoft Excel functions:

Adding, Subtracting, Multiplication, Division:

Creating graphs:

With Excel you will be able to do this

Or this

In conclusion, similarly to Microsoft Word, Excel has its own set of functions that can be used under many different perspective and served different needs. Again, there are lots of other functions that you can do on Excel besides those that I've just listed, but I'll leave that for you to discover. Thank you.

Sources:

Office, M. (2013). Available Chart Types. Retrieved from Microsoft Office: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/available-chart-types-HA001034607.aspx

Introducing Microsoft Word

Hello everybody. Today I will be talking about one of the most useful computer software applications that everybody might have heard of before or used it at least once, which is Microsoft Word.

First of all, I want to talk about Microsoft Office. Needless to say, Microsoft Office is one of Windows' and Bill Gates's most successful applications. Being announced by Bill Gates for the first time in August 1989, Microsoft Office gives the user the choices between Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, etc. Each of the applications helps the user perform different tasks that are necessary at school and in business. In this blog I will be focusing on Microsoft Word only.

Microsoft Word is a graphical word processor application that can help user type down everything s/he wants to. With a bunch of features such as Bullets, Spell and Grammar Check, WordArt, Macro (recording a series of action), Numbering, etc., Word is used for many purposes, such as writing letters, taking notes at school, writing essays, creating work for research and publication, and many more.

Microsoft Word's background functions

Examples of Bullets and Numbering:

Examples of Spelling and Grammar Check:

Examples of WordArt:

There are lots of things that one can do from Microsoft Word, besides taking notes, writing essays or letters. These are only the uses that I have found so far using Microsoft Word. How about you?

Thank you for reading :)


Sources:

Kelly, S. (2013, January). Microsoft Word's Basic Concepts. Retrieved from http://shaunakelly.com/topic/word/concepts

Maxwell, K. (n.d.). How to create a numbered or bulleted list. Retrieved from Digital Unite: http://digitalunite.com/guides/microsoft-word/how-create-numbered-or-bulleted-list

Benefits of using the Computer

Hello everyone. I'm writing this blog to tell you about the benefits that computers bring to every one of us.
As we all know, we are all living in a world that technology has been becoming very popular, and computer is one of the big contributor to this popularity. With the computers, we can perform lots of things that our human brain cannot; we can store things that we cannot remember ourselves. and much more. Below are some examples of the benefits that computers have been contributing to us:

- The computer helps us perform many things that we do daily, which helps us save a lot of time and effort. (e-mailing to a friend, sending documents, taking notes, checking news, paying your bank account, etc.)
- It helps you create high quality documents and drawings, and it helps you fix documents and drawings the way you want it. (Photoshop, Paint, Ms Word, Excel, etc.)
- The computer also makes you learn more about the technology world, as well as the function of the computer itself, which provides you more knowledge to be used in the future. (Nowadays, many employers seek for employees who are good at computer and computer applications. There are also lots of jobs that are related to the Information Technology section)
- It can connect you to people that don't even live around you. With just a few clicks, the real image of the person will appear right in front of your screen, make it feel like you are actually talking to that person sitting in front of you. (Skype, Facebook, Yahoo! Messenger, etc.)
- The computer can also be a great tool for entertainment. The user can buy, download and/or install games into the computer and play it whenever s/he can.
- It can do the shopping for you while you are at home. (Amazon, online stores, ...)

These are just a few of tons of benefits that computer can help you. I believe you would be able to figure out other benefits as you start using the computer. Try it out and see what else you can get :)

Thank you for reading my blog

Source:

Komalaa. (2010, April). Benefits of Computer. Retrieved from http://www.slideshare.net/Komalaa/benefit-of-computer

Introducing Dropbox - a storage service that will always keep your files up to date

Have you ever had a presentation where you have to bring in your USB to load your slides? Have you ever had a Word document to be printed somewhere else? Have you ever had to link your file in class and at home when you have 2 computers? Have you ever had a document to be retrieved in your phone and you have no plugs?

If I were to answer all of the questions above, my answers would be "Yes". And I think that it would be the same for you too. I often have to save my PowerPoint slides or my Word documents into my USB and bring it to class when I have a presentation or a document to be printed. Most of the times I found this both frustrating and annoying, part of it because I always forget where I put my USB, and part of it because I lose it too often. And what would happen if I lost my USB? Someone would have access to all the files that I put in my USB, of course. So I was looking around and I found this really cool service called Dropbox.

www.dropbox.com

Many of you might have heard about it already, but if you haven't, Dropbox is a free service that lets you bring your files anywhere you want, share them easily and secure them. Dropbox is an online storage that can store up to 50GB worth of files. And it's free! All you have to do is make an account with your e-mail (it should take you less than 5 minutes) and you can start saving your files in Dropbox.

Its biggest advantage is that you can share it between computers that have Dropbox installed on them. If I want to link my work at home and at school, I just need to install Dropbox on both computers, and I can start sharing files between my computer at home and my laptop without the need of an USB. Even if you are at a public computer and you want to access your file, you can simply sign in on its main website www.dropbox.com and download the file you need to the computer, or your phone. Besides, it gives you more than 50GB free of storage, which is a lot comparing to a 8GB or a 16GB USB. Additionally, it gives you the security that you have always wanted. Since the key is your password, you can never lose it and people can never get it.

While there are many advantages, here comes the biggest disadvantage that I found. It's that it takes up the connection every time you want to upload / download anything from Dropbox, and it will use lots of data (depending on the size of your files). I would recommend uploading / downloading when you have Wi-Fi, or unlimited data, or your next bill will be a big surprise :)

To sum up, Dropbox is an awesome free service that can help you a lot throughout your life. I hope you try and enjoy it as I already do

Source: My own knowledge about this wonderful application :)