Departmental IT Support

You can create PDFs by printing to the cspdf printer on staffprinting.

How to connect to the printer (instructions for XP users):
Here are the step by step instructions for XP users.

1. Click on Start –> Printers and Faxes
2. Click on Add a printer (in the left hand blue column)
3. A new window will pop up and you should click next as “connect to a network printer” should be highlighted. If this isn’t, please select it.
4. In the next window. Select the button “Connect to this printer…” and type the name of the printserver then the printer name e.g. “\\staffprinting\cspdf”. You may be asked at this point if you want to install a driver on your machine, click yes
5. When you want to create a PDF, you will choose cspdf as your printer and press print as you normally would.
6. An email will appear in your inbox from “The School of Computing My PDF system” with a link where you can download your PDF from.

Bear in mind that your PDF will only be available for download for 7 days so do this as soon as possible after you have requested it.

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What is BoB?

BoB National is a shared off-air recording and media archive. BoB (short for Box of Broadcasts) provides staff and students with online access to television and radio programmes from the previous seven days, as well as allowing users to book recordings for broadcasts seven days in advance, from more than 50 television and radio channels. Users may also search thousands of programmes stored in the growing archive.

Subscribers can compile playlists of extracts or full titles for personal use or to share with other staff and students. Searches can be run by title or keyword and the BoB National archives are held indefinitely for access by all registered users.
(Information taken from British Universities Film and Video Council Website)

How to access BoB

BoB is simple to access, simply go to http://bobnational.net/
Click on UK Federation Login (this is under the login box)
Type in Kent in the Where are you from box then click on University of Kent as it appears underneath and click on Submit.
Type in your Kent username and password.

Record a programme
BoB has a two week buffer where you can choose which programmes you want to record (i.e. the current week and the week after) and the recordings go into a central library of recorded programmes accessible to anyone.  For instance, if you wanted record this week’s Panorama programme, you could search for it and click on the option to schedule a recording.

Search the Archive
If it is a programme that you know was broadcast in the last few months, you won’t be able to tell the programme to record yourself as it has passed the two week buffer where you can select programmes to be recorded.  Instead, you could search for in the central library of recorded programmes on BOB as someone else might have decided to schedule it for recording and it may already be in the BOB recording programmes library. 

BoB does have some tools where you can actually select a chunk of a recording i.e. if you wanted to show a short part of a Panorama programme, you can select it so it is already cued up for you and you don’t have to worry about finding the right section of the programme when you are giving your lecture.

If you want more information about BoB, please contact Matthew Wilson M.J.Wilson@kent.ac.uk

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Some people have asked how to reset their settings from printserver1 to staffprinting.  Here are the step by step instructions for XP users.

1. Click on Start > Printers and Faxes
2. Click on Add a printer (in the left hand blue column)
3. A new window will pop up and you should click next as “connect to a network printer” should be highlighted.  If this isn’t, please select it.
4. In the next window. Select the button “Connect to this printer…” and type the name of the printserver then the printer name e.g. “\\staffprinting\tigger”.

You will then be able to decide if you want to make this your default printer or not.

In order to avoid confusion, please delete the old printer i.e. \\printserver1\tigger by doing the following:

1. Click on Start > Printers and Faxes
2. Right click on the printer you want to delete and select Delete from the menu options.
3. Click yes when you are asking if you are sure you want to delete the printer on printserver1.  The printer will disappear from the list of printers.

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I’ve had a lot of queries and concerns from Postgraduate students who have been migrated over to ConnectMail from Kentmail so I’m putting together a list of Frequently Asked Questions to try and help.

1. I’m not getting any emails through.

Have you checked that you are using the right service for email?  You would have received an email saying that your account has been migrated to ConnectMail.  This is completely different from Kentmail and can be accessed via the web at the following address:

https://owa.connect.kent.ac.uk/OWA/

If you are on-site using one of the XP Staff Managed Desktops, you will automatically be logged directly into your email account.

If you are offsite, you will need to put in your user name and password.  Sometimes you may need to prefix your user name with UKC\

e.g. UKC\yourusername

2. I am logged in on campus to one of the staff desktops and have more than one Kent account but I can only see one email account.

You will need to log out and log in again using your alternative login.

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I will keep adding to this as I get more questions in so if you need help or are confused about ConnectMail, please do drop me a line S.J.T.Osborne@kent.ac.uk

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I’ve come across a useful page which explains how to turn on the Accessibility options for blind/visually impaired users.  Has anyone had any experience of trying this yet with the Staff Managed desktop?  If you have please do comment and let us know how you have gotten on.

Also, if you know of a similar page which describes how to turn on these options for Vista, please do let us know.

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Vivienne from IMSAS told me about this useful link where you can hover on items that you would use in Word 2003 and learn how to do them in Word 2007.

There are a load of other tools on the site for doing a similar thing for Access, Excel, etc.

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Has anyone had any experience with trying to install Nvivo 8 on a Mac? The Nvivo forum on their Q&A website seems to indicate that it is ok if you have Boot Camp installed (which is supposed to be part of the Leopard OS) then it is ok.  I tried click on the install.exe file on the CD from Computing Service but I got a garbled message.

Updated: I have since spoken to Christine about this and she has suggested that I get hold of a copy of Parallels so that I can run a virtual desktop to install Windows on and install Nvivo in that.

Thanks, Christine.

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The following message comes up when I’ve been trying to convert the data set to Excel in SPSS version 16.

Note: I’ve deleted the user name to preserve their privacy.

These are the steps that I’ve been using to try and convert to Excel before I get the above message:

1. In the SPSS Viewer, clicked on the dataset that needed to be converted and waited for it to process in right hand window.

2. Right-clicked on pivot table in right hand window and selected Export.

3. In the Export Output screen, the radio button set was set to Selected, document type set to Excel, then clicked OK.

After some time, the above message comes up.

Can anyone shed any light on what has happened and how to fix it? Or point me in the direction of a resource that might help?

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I had someone call me up about sending emails in plain text using OWA last week and I gave them the following instructions:

1. From right hand top of the page select Options

2. From left hand menu choose Messaging

3. Scroll down to Message Format

4. Click on the radio button Plain Text

5. Click on Save button at the top of the page

I was a bit puzzled to find that they didn’t have those options until I realised that they had the low vision settings switched on.

In order to get emails to go as Plain Text you need to switch off that option thusly:

1. Click on Options

2. Click on Accessibility

3. Untick Use the blind or low vision experience

4. Click on Save

5. Log out of OWA then log in again for settings to take effect.

It is a solution but as the person who raised the query pointed out, difficult to see what was being sent because they needed the low vision experience switched on to read the screen.

Has anyone found an easier way of doing this?  Please do comment!

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Welcome to the Departmental IT support blog.

We’ve set up this blog to share tips, questions and other interesting stuff for departmental IT support people.   Please feel free to leave us a comment or share anything you find interesting.

Cheers,

Sam, John, Christine, Helena, Gerard and … (could this be you? Let us know and we’ll add you as a contributor if you’d like to take part)

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