General tips and guidelines

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General tips and guidelines

Looking to learn something new, get help with a problem that's been bugging you for a while or you're just too lazy to actually do all that homework? Well, hopefully this section will help you out, provided you are kind enough to try and follow these tips or guidelines. Although not enforced or official, it still makes you very awesome for making our lives easier when we spend our time trying to help you <3

This is also a WIP - if you have any suggestions and recommendations, do tell! I'll happily add more and expand this thread.

General stuff that's good to mention

• Subject or field of study that's going to be discussed, explained or whatever
• Grade, as it's not only good to know whether we are even able to help you but also lets us know how much and how to explain or help you out (hopefully this will usually be the case)
• The problem, task, topic or whatever you need explained, solved or assistance with. And I don't mean that you say "Binomial theorem pls", I mean that you try and tell us what is expected and how much you already know etc.

Equations, diagrams, etc.

Often many tasks will come with diagrams, equations or other visual aids required to solve or understand the problem. It's not cool to leave us in the dark and have us guess, so be a champ and upload any equations, diagrams etc. if you possibly can. If you can't, you can always either draw the diagrams or rewrite the equations yourself.

A couple of programs I always recommend for drawing diagrams, graphs and the such are:

• GeoGebra
  
  • An epic, free, Java-powered applet that can be used for anything visual. Although the focus is on graphing and mathematical constructions, it's an awesome tool to create every imaginable diagram in physics, chemistry, biology ... as long as you disable the axis, grid and you know your way around basic maths relating to geometry. If you don't your experience might be limited, but it still features a rich, easy to use interface for all the basic functions. It can be used online as an embedded app without installation.
• yEd
  
  • Another Java-powered program, this time focused more on graphing - whether it be for pure mathematical graph theory or presenting complex social structures, computer algorithms, cellular processes etc. Easy to use with a simple drag and drop interface, easily accessible options etc. Great for presenting your ideas when you just can't seem to word them right.

For general use (meaning it can handle both diagrams, graphs, etc. and equations, chemical reactions etc.) there are two programs that you can always rely on:

• Microsoft Office (specifically Word)
  
  • It has everything a beginner could want. Actually it has everything you will ever need in high school, perhaps even in university. Any diagram, table, equation can be simply copy & pasted into Paint, saved as an image, uploaded and shared on MPGH. And best of all - it's so simple!
• MikTeX (A LaTeX compilation for Windows)
  
  • "Omg that's like source code sh1z!1!!1!". Yes, it's not WYSIWYG and it's not very simple to use once you start out. But it gets awesome and it can do everything. Everything.

Microsoft Word

Go to the insert strip or whatever they call it and ... voila!

Shapes

They're so simple that if you need help with them ... well then make a thread for that.

SmartArt

First off, choose the most appropriate layout you can find. E.g. if we were looking to display some cyclic process, we would choose something like this:

Regardless of what layout you choose though, you will always end up with an input box similar to this, which will influence what the layout presents. Take note of the changed controls on the strip on top, which now allow you to reorder and change the levels of whatever information you wish to enter into the SmartArt:

Equations

Again, once you enter a new equation, the strip on the top will change appropriately and offer you a selection of different structures that you can enter to create whatever sort of equations you could desire.

Although the equations can turn out quite nice, there is no simply way to transfer them to MPGH, the best way is to simply screenshot them (I personally recommend using Hyperdesktop as it allows for uploading of selected regions). A few simple examples can be seen below:

MikTeX (LaTeX)

Tl;dr I'm lazy. Will be written sometime in the future. Till then just google LaTeX for basic instructions, LaTeX maths for basic maths and LaTeX TikZ for visual representations.