In this edition, we have added flash animations to many of our tutorials. These animations walk you through various processes, pointing out exactly what you would do step-by-step. They are an invaluable teaching tool and much easier to follow than other ways of presenting the same material. If you are able to use these animations, you will be pleased by how easy they are to understand
Although these animations are much better than other alternatives at showing you how to perform certain tasks, they have the disadvantage that they take up considerably more space than more traditional ways of presenting the same material. What that means is that the animations take more time to download than most of the pages of the website. If you have a high-speed Internet connection, the download time for the animations will be minimal, and you will barely notice the delay. However, if you are working from a dial-up connection, the download times can be several minutes. Since the animations try to run as a streaming video, they may start running and then stop because they have to wait for more of the information to download before they can continue. Streaming video reduced the waiting time for downloads by beginning to show the movie before the entire move is downloaded. While the first part of the movie is playing, the computer continues to download the rest of the movie.
We have included as an option an alternative to the flash animations for those people who do not want to wait for the animation to download. These are simple images, which show the key elements, but do not show the action sequence of the animation. They are listed in the tutorials as a Page View alternative to Animations.
These flash animations will run on all of the recent browsers, but if you have a very old browser, it may not know how to translate the instructions in the animations into actions on the screen. The easiest fix is to download an updated version of the web browser that you are using. This link takes you to instructions on how do to this.
Controlling flash animations is just like controlling a video recorder. There is a control bar at the bottom of the screen that resembles the controls on a video recorder, with buttons for play, pause, stop, fast rewind, and fast forward. The animations were set up to be presented at a brisk, but manageable pace. If you find it is too fast, you can also pause the recorder to take in the steps or have the animation run again and again until you feel you understand all the steps.