Post date: Feb 7, 2014 7:32:03 PM
We've had a lot of snow days this semester, so in that time I’ve been constructing my evidence portfolio. All in all I’ve probably spent more time on it than necessary. Had I just collected documents and put them in transparent sleeves arranged by component it would’ve taken all of two hours, which is about how long it took to find everything and scan it. That being said I did not want to do it that way. I wanted to see if I could get a little better at managing a word document seeing as that's kind of an artform in of itself with Word's famously janky text flow.
I scanned everything and put it in Word. I looked at publisher, I thought publisher would be a lot like InDesign, which it is, but for some reason I just didn’t feel motivated to do it. Publisher has the same set up as InDesign, you have to make each text box, place each picture, and it offers you lots of control over that kind of stuff. I just didn’t really want to manually do all that. Tables in word sounded like a good alternative. It worked for the most part. Table styles are weird, they make some sense, and I was able to adjust things after fiddling with them for a while. The fact that columns and rows each have customizable features is a little buried, it’s some drop down menu in the middle of the freakin’ Modify dialogue box. If you don’t find that you’re stuck wondering why text is always bolded in your first column. Don’t even get me started on how chapters work. I figured it out but I’m pretty sure I won’t be able to do that for sections of chapter without fiddling with it for a whole afternoon. At this point I just gave up and stuck with the few sections/chapters I had managed to create.
I do love the fact that Word 13 actually makes things like text wrapping and cropping little easy to reach symbols upon right clicking. That was very handy. All in all there are just too many weird things word does. Like if you shrink a “placed” or inserted picture with the shift and arrow keys it stays fixed on your screen as text and other things shrivel and wrap around it. The picture never stays placed on the page you place it in or on. Not sure if that has to do with the anchor or the idea that Word thinks you need to see the picture at all times, the problem of course is that then you have to move the picture again in its shrunken state. If this command was more like InDesign’s click and drag they could save themselves so much trouble.
Now, griping aside, I have made my evidence portfolio. It’s something like 125 pages, all digital, and I’ve printed out a hard copy version. Both are very easy to read, I think, and well organized. I’ve written a lot as well. I don’t really know why I did that. It was almost compulsive, and I didn't really review or edit it too heavily so there’s probably too much in there. In fact I know there’s too much in there because I didn't actually have to write anything at all, I could’ve just put everything in there and my administration would have been fine with it. Some of the evidence portfolio’s I’ve seen from colleagues are organized just by domain and component with only hard copies. This makes sense and is less labor than what I did. I don’t really expect my version to be definitive either, I’ve made it just to see if I could make it. And to see if I could get over the minor technical hurdles. I guess my experience with other programs helped because now I have pretty good digital work habits. It wasn’t frustrating at all despite my earlier complaints. Those complaints are largely targeted at perceived workflow issues with Word, not overall usability to complete what I wanted exactly as I am able to in other programs.
Below are three links to view various documents I’ve made. The first is my evidence portfolio, the digital version, and all 125 pages of it. After that is a link to the template with some brief tutorials I’ve inserted for the tables, text wrapping, and text styles I used. The main thing to keep in mind if you use my template is that you can’t delete the section breaks or alter the Main domain headings. They’re linked to the chapters and TOC in ways that’ll screw up the pagination in the TOC if edited. I will, when I feel like it, create individual component section pagination, that way if you make a new page at the end of your component 4e for example, the page will just read 4.4e.15 and then the next section will just be 4.4f.1 so that you can add newly made pages without screwing anything up except your printed TOC.
If that doesn't make sense, don’t worry, it’s a weird technical thing.
These first set of links are for Drive, below that are links to documents hosted on this website, they will download the files automatically if you click on them. The drive links you can use to view and then download if you have a Google account (which is easy and free to set up). The drive files are handy if you only want to see and edit those files in Drive or have a consistent location for that file. I also highly recommend that you only view my portfolio, do not download it, it's a rather large file.
Drive Links:
Evidence portfolio blank template v1.0