Thursday, January 24, 2008

Remove Office on Mac sux

The Remove Office program that comes with the trial version of Microsoft Office just sucks. The two times I've used it, it's failed. The first time, I had my old iMac connected via Firewire (target disk mode) to my new iMac. I ran Remove Office on the new iMac to remove the trial version, and it removed the non-trial version on my old iMac - without even asking me which version to remove. Now, on my new MacBook, I tried running Remove Office (without any other computers connected), and it couldn't find the trial version to remove - never mind the fact that I was running Remove Office from the folder containing Office.

My advice to anyone is to just use 'rm -r' from the Terminal window. If you just drag it to the trash (without emptying the trash), the trail version will keep launching.

enjoy,
Charles.

Sunday, January 20, 2008

Exporting from ExamView to Moodle

I've just started using Moodle for a course (more on that later), and I wanted to import some questions I wrote using ExamView into Moodle. Although our version of Moodle (1.8?) suggests that it can import EvamView questions, it failed for me. I came across this post that suggests that it isn't even supported - at least not by the company that makes ExamView. Based on that post, here's what I ended up doing:
  1. From ExamView Pro (version 4.0.8) export as Blackboard 5.x, which is a zip file.
  2. Unzip the zip file.
  3. Import the .dat file into Moodle as a Blackboard, not Blackboard V6+
(And, all of this is made more complicated by the fact that I've basically abandoned the PC for the Mac, and I only have a version of ExamView for the PC. Praise be to VMware for Fusion.)

There may be a simpler way to do this, but it works, which is all that matters right now. It would be swell if I could automate the process...

enjoy,
Charles.