Tabs and Tables

I bought the Chronicle this morning at Starbuck's, because it hadn't yet been delivered to my house when I left for school. In the student dining room, I shared sections with Dava and Tashana before class started. Dava said that even though she's busy with school, she plans to pay close attention to politics this year. Tashana asked me who Imus and Rutgers are. "Do they always have this page with letters to the editor?" Dava asked who the last Democratic president was, and when I said, "Bill Clinton," she said, "But Hillary's a Republican, right?"

* If you double-click on the Format Painter tool, you can use it repeatedly.

Chef Stephanie emphasized some document formatting tricks today which made a lot of sense to me. She suggested typing all your data into the document before beginning formatting (we copied a sample wine list, with glass and bottle pricing, and sections for sparkling, red, and white wines.) Don't ever use the space bar for alignment ("It's completely unstable"). There should only be one tab between two words or pieces of information. Use paragraph formatting between paragraphs, instead of hard returns.

When she showed the class how to insert a table into a document, she said, "It looks rigid and solid. It is not." Our competency for today was to format a recipe we brought into class. I took my mother's Kuchen (generic "cake" in German) recipe — I have a scanned copy of the three handwritten 4x6 cards that she has tucked behind the plastic pages of a yellowed photo album.
Her recipe is in prose, with the ingredients interspersed throughout, so rewriting it into a more readable format was a useful exercise.

Though not as fun as making it.