Welcome back to our course on Project 2013. I’m going to look at touch in this short
section. If you’re not intending to use touch and maybe not even interested in using
touch or how people use it, then you can pretty much skip this section. If you are going to
use touch or if you’re considering using touch, then it’s quite a short section and
I think it’s very useful to go through it with me.
The first thing I’d like to point out to you is this blog post on office.com, Using
the new Office with touch. You can find that by Googling it or by going to microsoft.com
and searching. But it is an extremely good post which basically gives the background
to how Microsoft went about addressing touch in Office 2013 in general. From the point
of view of touch, Project is part of Office 2013. So virtually everything that you see
in this blog post is relevant to Project. Now I’m not going to go through all the
detail here. It’s a really interesting document to read. It not only gives the background
as to why they did things the way that they did but it also goes into some detail of the
particular requirements of different aspects of using a fairly advanced piece of software
with a touch device. They recognized in particular that one of the key issues with using a touch
device, as we’ll see during this course, is the accuracy of touching part of the screen.
Particularly, if you’ve got fairly fat fingers like mine in comparison with accessing maybe
just a single point on a screen using a mouse. Now if you go through this article, it gives
background to the vision for touch by Microsoft, the sort of guidelines they followed and then
some particular issues like targeting which is really the targeting a specific point on
the screen. And then things like the changes they made to the Ribbon. Now we’re going
to look at the use of the Ribbon with touch in the next section so I won’t go into that
here. And then further down they talk about other user interface elements. A good example
is the color picker. That’s not particularly relevant to Project, although you do use it
in a couple of situations in Project. But again the general principle is to take the
conventional color picker and just make everything bigger to be easier to operate with your fingers.
Anyway it’s an extremely interesting and informative article and I do recommend that
you go through, take the time to just read through it. I will be referring to it from
time to time and many of the points that it makes later on in the course and in many ways
it forms the background to many aspects of touch in Project 2013.
And the other important article which is also on microsoft.com is the Office Touch Guide.
Now you may have seen this in an earlier version where it was basically a text document. The
version that’s available as I’m recording this course has got some little video demonstrations
of some aspects of using touch. Now again, I’m not going to go through all of these
now because the ones that are particularly relevant I’m going to go through at the
various points in the course. But let’s just take the first example, Zoom in and out.
If I click on zoom in and out, you get a little demonstration of using stretch and pinch.
Watch again. The idea is if you want to zoom into something, you stretch. If you want to
zoom out you pinch. So zooming in by stretching your fingers apart gets you closer to the
subject, and then zooming out by pinching gets you farther away. Now for each of the
different kind of gesture with touch, there’s a little video demonstration in this article,
Office Touch Guide. So scroll. So, there’s a demonstration there of how to scroll through
a document on screen. I’ll just play that again. Notice how the user is basically touching
the screen, you see a little sort of flash as they touch the screen, and then they hold
it as they scroll through the document. Now if you are intending to use touch I suggest
you locate this document and work through all of the different gestures; basic gestures,
gestures with shapes and objects. Again, not particularly relevant to Project 2013 many
of these, but some of them are. And then further down particularly text, selecting text and
formatting text, we will be looking at using touch later on. And then there are some specifics
related to Excel and PowerPoint. There are none specifically in relation to Project but
many of the earlier ones are relevant. Now I am going to be demonstrating touch at
various points on the course and as I introduce each new gesture, I’ll go through an example.
Unfortunately, it’s not practical on a course like this to do everything using both touch
and the mouse and keyboard. It would mean doing everything twice which would get a little
bit tedious for everybody, including me. So I’m primarily going to use mouse and keyboard
on the course, and I’ll introduce touch as various points. I’ll use examples with
touch, but primarily it’ll be mouse and keyboard. And if you are using a touch device,
I suggest that you practice using that right from the outset and you will find that virtually
everything in Project is perfectly possible using touch. And in my experience so far,
if you’re using touch with Project 2013, really the only area where I still have a
little bit of difficulty is when I need to target something very precisely. In some situations,
that is still quite difficult but maybe with a bit more practice I’ll get over that as
well. That’s it for this section. I’ll see you in the next one.