Many students try to print PowerPoint slides  or Word documents from inside Blackboard.  Doing so may be causing problems depending how the web browser they are using is configured.

They may need to save the PowerPoint presentation OUTSIDE of Blackboard
before sending it to print:

1. Open the Blackboard course and find the PowerPoint presentation or Word document to be printed.
2. Right click on the title of the PowerPoint presentation or Word document.
3. Select SAVE and save the presentation or document to the desktop.
4. Minimize Blackboard.
5. Open the presentation or documentfrom the desktop.
6. Select FILE, and then PRINT from the top menu.
7. A print window will open.
8. For presentations, about two thirds of the way down the print window, find Print what:
   1. Open the drop-down list directly below that and select Handouts.
   2. To the right of that, select the number of slides per page.
9. Then click OK. This will send your project to the printer.

Files with the extension .docx are for files created by Microsoft’s Office 2007. Unfortunately, this file format is not understood by many other office productivity and word processing applications making it hard to view them if you don’t have Microsoft’s Office 2007.

You do have a number of options that you can take when trying to view these filees. The first and easiest is to ask the sender of the .docx file to resend the document in the older Office 2000 format or in the more generic Rich Text Format. If not, you can try the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats.

If you are using OpenOffice with Linux, Novell has an OpenOffice OpenXML Translator.

If you are using Office 2004 on a Mac, there is an OpenXML (the underlying format of .docx files) available on Microsoft’s Mactopia website that should help.

Many companies and organizations run these sorts of deals and create the rules that require a .edu address under the mistaken assumption that all schools use .edu addresses for all of their email systems.We don’t use .edu for our student email domain. However, usieagles.org is registered to the University of Southern Indiana and has the same technical and administrative contacts as as the domain registration for usi.edu.

It is really those organizations and companies that aren’t honoring that relationship due to poor planning and bad assumptions on their part. Anyone can verify that usieagles.org is a valid University of Southern Indiana owned domain using publicly available and widely understood tools.

USI is not the only institution of higher education to use multiple (non edu) domains. There are many schools that use .org addresses for their student email. We had the same problem with Facebook when it was only open to universities. After Facebook realized that a number of institutions of higher educuation use .org addressing for their student email, they changed their policies to allow registrations from these valid domains.

The best step to take when encountering this problem is to contact the organization running the promotion. If you can’t find any contact information, it probably isn’t a place you want to deal with anyway. If it is a company with multiple divisions, like Microsoft, or Dell, Gateway, or Apple, try to find their education division. Most offer some sort of toll free 800 number for sales inquiries.

Tell them to do a whois lookup on usieagles.org and on usi.edu. The results of those searches will clearly show that both domains are owned by this university. That should prove the relationship and hopefully they will work with you to get your discount.

Other companies will accept other forms of proof of your enrollment with a university. See if the company offering the promotion will accept something besides an email address to prove your eligibility. It should be noted that email isn’t very concrete proof of enrollment as many institutions give .edu addresses to alumni that wouldn’t be eligible for educational discounts. Some forms of proof that many companies accept include faxed photocopies of your student ID, and proof of enrollment letters from the Registrar’s Office.

See Also:

• Podcast Episode 2: Why is the address of myUSI www.usieagles.org?
• Why is the address for myUSI www.usieagles.org?