Due Date: Sunday September 30th, 2007 at 11:59pm
Weight: 15%

Part A: Word

Introduction

The company for which you work originally had all of its policy information documents in plain text format. Your company has asked you to revamp the plain text version of the document that outlines the company's policy on Employee Benefits. As this document will be mailed to each employee, you will also need to create a form letter to send to each employee and address labels to be placed on the envelopes in which the Employee Benefits document and form letter will be mailed.

Your Task

You have been provided with the benefits.txt document, which contains no formatting whatsoever. Your task is to open this document in Microsoft Word and to drastically improve its general appearance, so that it has a much more professional look and feel. Here are a few additional specific requirements:

• Replace all occurrences of MyCompanyName by a company name of your choice.
• The first two lines of the benefits.txt document (MyCompanyName and Employee Benefits) should appear on the title page, which will be the first page of the new document. Use Word's clip-art (or clip-art from the Internet) to add an image to the title page as well.
• Use the Styles and Formatting task pane to apply formatting to your document. Choose either Heading 1 or Heading 2 for each major heading in the document. The following headings should use the Heading 1 formatting style:
  • the heading at the top of the table of contents page
  • Introduction
  • Medical Plans
  • Dental and Vision Plans
  • Life Insurance Plans
  • Miscellaneous
  • Holidays and Vacations
  • Paid Leaves
• Create at least one custom formatting style and apply it to a few words in the document.
• The second page of your document should contain the table of contents. The table of contents should be on a page of its own, and should have a heading at the top of it. Use your preferred format for the table of contents.
• Switch your document to the Outline view, and make sure that each Heading 1 is Level 1, each Heading 2 is Level 2, and all Normal style text is Body text. This will be required in order to quickly convert your document to a PowerPoint presentation for Part B of this assignment.
• Correct all spelling mistakes.

Add a header and footer to all pages, except the first page of the document. The header should contain the same information as the title page, and the footer should provide the page number. If you are unsure how to do this, use the Help menu, as this was not demonstrated during your tutorial. Learning how to do something on your own is good practice, as in your co-op work placements, it is likely that at some point you may be asked to do a task that you have never done before.

Save your document as benefits.doc. Also save a copy of your document as a template (policies.dot), which could be used as for the basis of creating other policy documents.

You have been provided with an Excel spreadsheet called list.xls that contains the addresses for each person who should receive a copy of the Employee Benefits document that you have created. Use mail merge to create a form letter (with each recipient's name and address merged) that explains the document that you are sending (use a wizard if you like). Be sure to include the company's name and graphic (used on your title page), but the remaining contents of this letter is up to you. You can make up a fictitious company address, and you can use your own name in the signature of the letter. Create a file called letters.doc that contains all form letters after performing the mail merge (if the file size is too large, it is acceptable to submit a file that contains only the first 5 form letters).

The form letter and the Employee Benefits document for each employee will be placed in an envelope onto which an address label will be affixed. Use mail merge to generate mailing labels (Avery standard 8160-Address) for the envelopes. Save the file of labels as labels.doc.

Part B: PowerPoint

Introduction

You have also been asked to create a PowerPoint presentation that provides an overview of the Employee Benefits Word document that you have created in Part A. The main structure of the PowerPoint presentation will be based on the headings that have been used in the Word document. We do not require you to complete the body of each slide for this assignment, although you may if you like.

Your Task

Since you have gone to the trouble of using Outline levels in the Word document, simply opening the Word document in PowerPoint will save you a lot of work! When you open this document in PowerPoint, each Level 1 heading will appear as a title at the top of a separate slide. Subsequent outline levels will appear as bullets within the slides.

If you were to create a real presentation for the material in the Employee Benefits document, after you have opened the Word document in PowerPoint, you would then refer back to the Word document and type in more points to mention during the presentation. This would be a relatively straight forward task, so you are not required to do this for this assignment (although you can if you wish). Instead, here are a few specific requirements:

• Open benefits.doc in PowerPoint.
• Insert a title slide at the very beginning of your presentation. This slide should include the same text and graphics that were used on the cover page of your Word document.
• You will find that there may have been a few extra blank slides inserted. Delete these slides, so that you have at least these 8 slides in your presentation:
  • title slide
  • Introduction
  • Medical Plans
  • Dental and Vision Plans
  • Life Insurance Plans
  • Miscellaneous
  • Holidays and Vacations
  • Paid Leaves
• Choose a built-in slide design (or one that you find on the Internet) for your document. Generally you should choose an appropriate design, depending on the audience for the presentation. In this case, you should choose something fairly professional, since it will be the company's employees who will attend the presentation. Another option would be to choose a design that fits the theme of the company (i.e., an ocean background image would work well for a company that sells surf boards).
• The Title Slide layout should be applied to the first slide in your presentation. The remaining slides may use the default style that includes a Title and Text.
• Add some animation effects to the title slide. Make it as flashy as you like -- we will make an exception to the general rule that too many animated effects can be distractive to the audience.
• Make some changes to the various text boxes and elements on the Slide Master. Use the Slide Master to apply a transition effect between each slide in the presentation. Add page numbers to each slide too.
• Go to the "Medical Plans" slide, and use the Drawing toolbar to create a drawing that includes at least 1 basic shape, 1 block arrow, 1 flow chart object, 1 star or banner, and 1 callout. Use 2 different lines and 2 different connectors to create lines between these objects. Write some text on at least one of the shapes. Change the colours and other properties of some of the shapes. The drawing does not have to be meaningful, as the only purpose of this requirement is to provide more practice with drawing objects. Select all objects that are part of your drawing, and group them together, as demonstrated in tutorial. Now the whole drawing can be manipulated as one object.
• Go to the "Dental and Vision Plans" slide, and add notes related to the information in the Word document (notes are intended for the person presenting the slide show). Notes will not be visible during the actual presentation, but are visible in some views.
• Open the holidays.xls file, and copy the pie chart at the bottom of the slide. Then go to the "Holidays and Vacations" slide, and paste. Reposition and resize this object on the slide if necessary.

Save your PowerPoint presentation as benefits.ppt. Save the template file as policies.pot; the template file could be used to apply the same Slide Master to additional policy documents that you convert to slide presentations.

Submission

Part A: Word

Submit the following files to Blackboard:

• benefits.doc
• policies.dot
• letters.doc
• labels.doc

Part B: PowerPoint

Submit the following files to Blackboard:

• benefits.ppt
• policies.pot

Using Blackboard

To submit your files for this assignment, login to Blackboard by entering your UTORid and password.

• click on the link for the CSCA01 course
• click on View/Complete Assignment: A1
• if you haven’t completed all of this assignment or if your assignment is not working correctly, please leave a note for your TA in the Comments box, explaining the missing parts of your assignment.
• next to Attach local file, click on Browse... to select your first file and then click the Add Another File button to add this file. For each additional file, repeat this process (i.e., click on Browse… and then Add Another File). The name of each file to be submitted will be shown in a list.
• click either Save or Submit. Make sure all of the files that you want to submit are listed before clicking Submit, as you CANNOT RESUBMIT AN ASSIGNMENT or individual file for an assignment! If you are not ready to submit your files, just click Save and visit this web site again later to complete the submission.

Always be sure to keep a backup of your submitted files, just in case something goes wrong.