Google Fusion Tables: Share and discuss your data online

While Google's Fusion Tables may not appeal to professional researchers who are conscious of data-security, there are some useful features which may appeal to beachelor's and master's students working on group projects. These include:

- Upload small or large data sets from spreadsheets or CSV files.
- Visualize your data on maps, timelines and charts.
- Pick who can access your data; hide parts of your data if needed.
- Merge data from multiple tables.
- Discuss your data with others. Track changes and discussions.

Five Rules for Data Visualization

Here are five rules for data visualisation, courtesy of Drew Conway.

HT: Liam Delaney on Twitter

How To Approach TeX Errors

Here is a good guide on how to approach TeX errors. Remember that you can always hit the return-key, but in the long-run that's not the optimal strategy. Even just from the point of view that your TeX files will be a nuisance to compile.

MicroSpell: a LaTeX Spellchecker

I was looking for a LaTeX Spellchecker recently, and MicroSpell seems quite good to me. It can be downloaded here; and there is a useful "getting started" section here.

Seminar on Introduction to LaTeX

Here is a link to a talk I gave last Friday on how to get started using LaTeX. It covers why one should use LaTeX to prepare papers and presentations, a step-by-step guide to installing the software, and some pointers on how to get it working.

Here is the content of the TeX file that generates the Pdf version of the presentation linked above. To operate this as a tex file, you will need to open a LaTeX editor (e.g. TeXnic Center), open a new TeX file, and paste in the contents from the link.

You cannot download the content of the TeX file as a file with a .tex extension. However, there are many files with .tex extensions that can be downloaded from the web. For example (as I mentioned on Friday), the Pdf of the presentation that I gave is based on the following Beamer template; the fourth .tex file down: http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/beamer/solutions/conference-talks/

Finally, here’s the .tex file template for the academic paper that was shown in the presentation on Friday: http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/~yogi/Courses/CS-Scientific-Writing/examples/simple/simple.htm

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Important Addendum (you will need to read this to make Friday's TeX file convert into Pdf):

There are a number of graphics in Friday's presentation. These must be saved in the same directory as the TeX file in order for the exact same Pdf to be produced. In fact, if these graphics are not present in the same directory then there will be a "fatal error" and the TeX file will not "compile". To avoid this, there are two options:

(i) Delete any slide that contains the "\includegraphics" command, or

(ii) Download and save this Pdf, which contains the four graphics that are required. Once you have opened the Pdf (after saving it), you can click on each graphic, copy it, paste it into Microsoft Paint (or a similar program you are familiar with) and save the the graphic as a .png file. Make sure to save the graphics into the same directory as the TeX file.

Some concluding notes are as follows. Graphic 1 in the Pdf has split into two parts; you can take either of these parts. Finally, LaTeX recognises .png, .jpeg or .eps graphics. In this case .png is used. The type of graphic must always be specified in the TeX file you are working with.

Dropbox

Thanks to John Regan for pointing me towards the DropBox software. It comes with 2GB free and syncs your files online and across your computers. The website says it does the following:

- Syncs files of any size or type
- Shares large files and photos easily
- Automatically produces online backups
- Tracks and undoes changes to files

Welcome

Welcome to the Geary Latex Users' Group Blog! This might be a good place to post links to tutorials, documents or packages that you find useful, or indeed solutions to knotty problems that you may have worked out and think others may appreciate.

When creating a new post, please put a one or two word description of the topic area, so that it's easy to search for. For example - "How to stretch a sub-title over two columns", should be labeled with "Tables"; "What's the command string for distributed as?", with "Characters" and "Symbols" (by the way, \sim is good for distributed as).