Meet Curt: College Instructor, Pilot, and Real Life Nitro User
Curt Scott isn’t an average college instructor, lecturing on ethics or econ. Professor Scott teaches aviation at Green River Community College. From how to fly a plane to air traffic control, he covers airplanes from the ground up. His courses in air traffic control are one of only 36 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) approved programs in the United States.
Document Challenges at the Instructor Level
The FAA send hefty study materials to Scott via large PDF files. In order to create lesson plans and digital presentations, Scott manually retypes the relevant content of these official documents—a laborious, tedious process. Once retyped, he edits the information and designs his lectures.
In addition to his work as a collegiate instructor, Scott also educates and presents to his colleagues. He gives talks at conferences, like the annual Air Traffic Collegiate Training Initiative, and finds himself having digital document issues when preparing for these presentations. He must move large amounts of data from a variety of file types, shuffle them into one format, and then prepare his slide deck.
Nitro to the Rescue
Scott’s entire method of constructing lessons and presentations has changed since he started using Nitro Pro. For classes, he utilizes Nitro’s conversion tool, swiftly changing PDF files delivered from the FAA into PowerPoint files with one click. Scott takes anywhere from 5 to twelve separate PDF files to create a single, cohesive lecture for his students. “The key is being able to extract certain things right out of a PDF file and put it into a PowerPoint. That’s the power of your tool. It’s huge,” he says.
For professional presentations at conferences, Scott again turns to Nitro Pro. He notes, “There’s awesome [information] out there, but it’s packaged with a bunch of stuff I don’t need that makes the presentation not usable.” By calling on Nitro, he is able to extract information he wants to include from a variety of file types, and then combine everything into one document. As an added bonus, he can edit text, images and layout in Nitro, or convert to a Microsoft Office document for editing. He is able to edit in any format, and convert back and forth between formats with ease.
More to Come
Nitro Pro is now part of Scott’s planning process when he embarks on a project. He is currently working on a proposal for submission to the state of Washington—he’d like to develop a 4 year degree in Air Traffic Control—and is already using Nitro to help him compile data. For Scott, Nitro isn’t just part of his work, it’s the way he works.
