Thank you, Pat Hase

The final meeting of our Computer Group for the year 2005/06, held on the 28th July, was a very special one. We were lucky enough to receive a visit from Pat Hase, Weston-super-Mare's best known geneologist and one of U3A Weston's mainstays, who gave us a demonstration on how to use Power Point. Most of us who have Microsoft Office on our computers have Power Point, but not many of us use it.

Pat showed us how she had compiled a presentation of a family tree, starting with one of its living members and then going back step by step through the generations until she reached the early seventeen hundreds. She used various methods to get her results, including a disc containing census information compiled by the Church of Latter Day Saints (Mormons to you and me). She had also tapped into sources available online and memoribilia supplied by the family. The result was a interesting illustrated history of a family going back over the centuries.

Her contribution extended beyond that. It gave us the opportunity to assess the usefulness of a projector working in conjunction with a laptop, and how effective different screens are at the Open Door. This has been an enormous help to us in choosing equipment that we hope to have available to us in the next session, starting on the 8th September.

Pat concluded her talk by giving us a quick tutorial on setting up a demonstration using Power Point. She based this on some pictures provided by Peter Watson of his recent walking holiday in Canada. We were left impressed by all this, although a suggestion from the chair that we might consider starting a small competition in setting up our own demonstrations fell upon deaf ears.

We would like to express our grateful thanks to Pat for giving us a most interesting morning. We were also pleased to welcome two guests. Martha Perriam, U3A Weston's Secretary, and Mike Wilkinson. the leader of the Science Group.