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This blog will be primarily aimed at innovative educational techniques but will however have the occasional post about education in general.

Friday, August 15, 2014

Google updates sheets to allow inserting Trendlines

Today ladies and gentlemen I am happy and sad at the same time.  As many of you are aware, I created an "add on" for Google Sheets to allow for adding trendlines to graphed data.  I recently made version 2 public (here is link Trendline Add on Ver 2).  In this version I included the statistical analysis to include showing the "r^2" value as well as the slope and y intercept.

I just learned today that Google has updated Sheets to allow.... wait for it.....  adding trendlines to a chart!!!

Here is a link to a GoogleGooru video that discusses adding trendlines: Adding Trendlines to Charts

Something that the video did not cover is how to show the "r^2" value and the equation of the trendline.  The "r^2" value is easy: there is a box that you can select to show it.  To show the equation you need to select the "Label" dropdown and choose "Use equation".

So, I am a sad that Google added something that I spent a lot of time and energy working on... but happy that they did so!!!


Saturday, August 9, 2014

New way to locate files in Google Drive!

I really just uncovered this wonderful feature of the new Google Drive interface.  I love the search capability of Drive but as a teacher I usually have other docs that correspond with the doc I am looking for so I need to know what folder it is in.  I know I can look at the details but there just needed to be a better way.  Well today I found it... do a search for your document, in the results you can right click on a file in and select "Locate in My Drive"!

I don't know about you but this is going to be a wonderful tool for me!!

Wednesday, August 6, 2014

Change the background of a PDF?

Excellent question.... and this was asked by Stephen Colley in a recent  Google+ post 


I know that you can use Micro$oft Word to convert the PDF to a Word doc, then change the background then re-save as a pdf but this requires Word. If you convert the pdf to a Google Doc then all you have is an "image" of the pdf and changing the page color does no good.

So, I went to my trusty pdf editor known as PDFEscape  and I found out something very interesting... I can open the PDF, add a rectangle over the whole page, set its color and, wait for it..... change it's opacity!!  I found that if the PDF was on a white page then an opacity of 30% makes it look great! I then took it an extra step and tried it with an image, and guess what.... it works!! Here is a link to a the pdf that I edited (note that it will show up in PDFEscape's read only viewer) Change the PDF background

My only compliant with PDFEscape is that it is not connected to Google Drive (at least as far as I can tell) so you have to do a "download - upload" dance.  But for me, it is worth it!!

Let me know what you use to edit PDFs or if you have a better way of changing the background of a PDF.