StudyMinder Tutotial 7: Program Options
This tutorial is a tour of the additional features, options and settings available with StudyMinder. You can download the program at http://www.studyminder.com
Transcript:
This is tutorial number seven in a series of tutorials about the StudyMinder Homework System. In this tutorial we'll look at some of the options and features that we haven't touched on in earlier tutorials.
Let's start with the help button at the top right. If you click this button, you can show and hide tips. When tips are showing, just move the mouse over a button or control and you can get additional information about that button. To turn it off, just click the help button again.
Next to the help button there is a small arrow that points up. When you click it, you can hide the ribbon bar. Click again to show the ribbon bar. When the ribbon bar is hidden, you can still use the controls. The File and the Tools tab are still visible. If you click on File you can see the ribbon bar appears. Click on Scheduler and the ribbon bar disappears. Click File again. The ribbon bar reappears and you can click on a different control. To show the ribbon bar again, just click the down arrow.
The default screen that appears when you first launch StudyMinder is the Activities Today. All of the activities that you have scheduled, including assignments, tasks, study time, everything will appear here in this list. If you double click on any of these rows, you can open that particular item. The default is for Today and Tomorrow. If you change the menu at the right side of the grid, you can change the date range. You can change it to this Week or This Month, or just back to Today and Tomorrow.
Just above the quotes is the study timer. This is intended for timing yourself while you do your study so you can see exactly how long you really spend. Just click the start button and the timer will begin. You can always pause the time by clicking pause. Start will continue it again. Next to the number display is a small button. If you click that button you can hide the seconds. Click again to show the seconds. To reset, just click pause and then reset, and you can start over.
Next to Colors and Name is the Options. There are several options which you can use to change the calendar. The default is Sunday as the start day of the week. When it's set to Sunday you can see that Sunday is on the left, the dates run Monday through Friday, and Saturday is the last day of the week. But in the Options we can change it to Monday or any other day. If you set it to Monday as the start day of the week, then Saturday and Sunday are now at the end of the week.
Next is the Calculate GPA feature. Let's go back and look at our assignments. If we click on the homework list you can see we have six assignments that we've created for our different classes, but we have not added any grades yet. Let's add grades to our Science classes. If we open up Science, here's our first Science assignment. Let's say that this assignment has a total possible score of one hundred and we got ninety five. When you enter the numbers, your grade and your percentage correct are listed here in the last two boxes. Notice that you cannot enter directly into the Percent or the Grade boxes. Just enter your final score and the total possible, and the grade and percent are calculated for you. Let's click Save and Close. The grade appears here in the list view. There's another assignment here for science. Let's open that one. Let's mark it as Done. Let's say that in this one we got fifty-five and the total was seventy five. So on this one we only got a 'C'. Save and close. OK, now when we go back to the Tools and click on Calculate GPA we can see our total GPA for all of our classes and also a breakdown for the other classes. We haven't added any grades yet for the other classes but we have for Science, so let's click Science and you can see we now have an average score of eighty six percent on our assignments. We've done two assignments so far, we have two hours of study time total for Science and we have currently a 'B' grade. So make sure that as you finish you assignments, go back and enter your grades and then you can click on the Calculate GPA and see exactly how you stand.
The last feature to talk about is probably the most fun to use. This is the Skins Gallery. StudyMinder comes with thirty eight different skins and all you need to do to change the complete look of your scheduler is click on any of these buttons and it will change. You can scroll through them or you can open up the window by clicking this bottom arrow here and they will all appear. You can choose from a number of different styles.
This concludes tutorial number seven on the options and special features in StudyMinder.