Good Online MS Office Training Courses

Wizardskills

Wizardskills

Wizardskills

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I'm looking for some MS Office training courses for my GF. She has worked in a supermarket for most of her life (She's now a baker) and is looking for a new career that will most certanly be more office based.

From looking around at job adverts the main thing she is lacking is any sort of knowlage of Microsoft Office as her employment to date hasn't really exposed her to computers. While I could teach her most things to do with office it wont give her a qualification she can put on her CV. The couse will need to be part time and not during the evening as she is in bed by 8:30 due to her current job. This pretty much only leaves online course which should work out fine for her.

Has anyone had any expericance with these as there seem to be quite a lot with quite a large price differance (£50 - £800)? We dont mind paying but we want to make sure the qualification would be worth the money.
 
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Azza said:
If she's looking for an admin based job then I don't think a course would be needed.

There are admin people where I work that struggle to see Outlook opened on a second screen never mind editing cells in an Excel sheet.
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Yes, when I was working in IT support most admin staff were rubbish with Office. However if she can show at the interview stage that she is profficent with MS Office it will give her the edge over the applicants who don't have a qualification.

Azza said:
This would be a good starting point - https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Office-Training-Center-b8f02f81-ec85-4493-a39b-4c48e6bc4bfb and this will be handy - http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=828564
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Thanks, I'll get her to take a look at these as they should prep her for whats is hopefully to come :D.
 
Groupon sometimes has various Excel etc. courses, not sure it's a qualification (wouldn't have thought an exam was included for 20 quid) but it may be a good starting point price wise.
 
Honestly, a qualification in office is pretty pointless. Just approach a local agency, say she wants to change jobs to an admin role and they'll find her something. As long as she can answer yes to the question "can you use office?" she'll be fine.

I would however, install MS Office + play with it. Start with Word, then Outlook, then Excel, powerpoint...

I would look at projects to do, how to write a letter, how to save a word doc as a pdf, how to format a word document, how to create styles, how to use table layouts in word etc.

With Outlook it's more a case of using the planner and task list as well as normal email use. Excel is the most complicated but most people barely scratch the surface.

There are elements to all the packages that the majority of admins won't ever touch.

I'd also look at other key skills, customer/client communication such as how to construct emails, how to have a phone conversation, filing systems, scanning/copying/shredding.

One of the big ones, time management, that's a massive plus on a CV.

How many words per minute can she type? touch typing is another great skill that can save a lot of time and looks good on a CV for admin roles.

I would also advise not just to stick with MS Office, I've been seeing more cases of OpenOffice and LibreOffice being used, thunderbird for email etc.
 
As long as she would be able to write a report, use templates, save to PDF (or other formats), use basic functions in Excel and load different file types into Excel (.csv etc.) that's proficient as you need to be really.

Don't restrict it to Microsoft office, go through some examples on OpenOffice/Google suite as well as some companies use them. 2-3 hours on each software package going through tasks like the above will be enough.
 
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