Tutorial Blog 2: Multimedia Graphics

I chose to research graphics this week because I am an avid picture taker and was genuinely curious about the different file formats used. 

Lets start off with a simple definition of multimedia: Multimedia is all the pictures, videos, and audio that are on any technological device that you probably use everyday like your phone or computer. But I'm going to focus on one type of multimedia that everyone is familiar with, graphics. 

Graphics, according to the "discovering computers 2010" textbook, are a digital representation of non-text information such as a drawing, chart, or a photo. Graphics are everywhere you look, like websites, magazines, books, tv, you name it graphics are in it! They are useful in illustrating concepts to readers/viewers, make boring reports easier to understand and more interesting to read, they can be used for  almost any purpose the user wants. Software like Microsoft powerpoint and Microsoft word have graphics stored in a folder called clipart for users to insert into their presentations for better understanding of a concept or just to jazz up the project's appearance. The picture to the right is a piece of clip art from the Microsoft word gallery. 

Sequential JPEG encoding and decoding processes

Graphics also have different types of formats but I will just discuss the two most common types: JPEG and GIF. JPEG  is a file format that compresses graphics so they wont take up so much storage space on your computers hard drive. It stands for "Joint Photographic Experts Group". Even though you can store many images in the JPEG format without worrying about taking up too much space, the negative aspect is the smaller the image the lower the quality. But the main goal of a JPEG file is to balance the size and quality of the graphic for the user. JPEG file formats are most common in digital photos because they do not limit the amount of color allowed in a graphic. The chart to the right, from Wikipedia.com, is a representation of how JPEG formats encode and decode graphics.

32 colors GIF

17 million colors JPEG

The next graphic format is GIF.  It stands for "Graphics Interchange Format". It is used when graphics only have a few basic colors in them. It is applied on graphics that are used for simple diagrams or company logos. GIF limits the number of colors allowed in a graphic, so the graphic in turn looks much sharper. A comparison of a JPEG formatted graphic and a GIF formatted graphic is above, from webwitchery.com. 

    Here is a video by smallbusinessplanned.com that I found on youtube. The voice on the video describes the differences between the graphic formats we have discussed, GIF and JPEG, as well as a couple others. I encourage you to watch this if you want more in depth knowledge about these formats we discussed.

Excel Project

The excel project was a great learning experience for me since most of the tasks that were required I hadn't done before. Typing the data into the spreadsheet was no problem for me but when it came to calculating the values to enter into the cells with the formulas, I was a little confused. I did have a problem with the freeze panes though because we were asked to freeze both top rows but the only option from the drop down menu was to freeze only the top row. So I got the top row to freeze but the second row wouldn't cooperate.
Another problem I had was with the TgtHR column. At first I entered the formula into the cell and clicked the drag down button to copy the action to the remaining cells in the column but it wasn't working. I got a little frustrated but finally i figured out how to make it work. Also for the TgtAchieved column we were asked to determine whether the target heart rates were achieved by the people and I had never performed a function with a yes or no answer so that took me a little while to figure out. I finally realized to use a formula stating whether the value is greater (>) than the other value and the output was a true or false answer. I actually enjoyed practicing all of these functions and learning how to do them more efficiently.
The one part of the project that I didn't necessarily enjoy was making the pivot tables. Besides being showed on the lecture how to configure a pivot table, I had no prior experience with creating one so that part was a challenge. Once I played around with it for a while I figured out how to make one and they seem to be a very useful tool for displaying portions of data.  Overall I learned a lot throughout the project and I'm looking forward to using the skills that I have learned with my own personal projects.