Computer Skills – Microsoft Office Training

Course Overview

Every office professional must use a computer to complete any variety of tasks; from simply creating a Word document, to creating a sophisticated Excel spreadsheet. Manhattan Review’s Computer and Microsoft Office skills course will reiterate basic computer skills and prepare you to tackle any problems with the Microsoft Office software suite. Any business professional can improve their efficiency and their worth to their organization with a few simple lessons in developing their computer and Microsoft Office knowledge. Our class is designed to both help the beginner on their way and to improve the seasoned pro with advanced techniques. Additionally, for those of you who will be taking the GMAT or continuing your education, there are opportunities to take computer based tests or electronic correspondence classes. Improving your ability to use, and understanding of computers will make any one of these tasks more simple and more fun.

The Microsoft Office Suite has four main components that we will focus on: Word, Excel, Power Point, and Entourage. Microsoft Entourage is an email client for the Macintosh system, and because many offices use Windows based computers, they use Microsoft Outlook. Because of this discrepancy, we will devote our time to cross platform software like Word, Excel and PowerPoint. This being said, it is important to understand email and the Internet, which we will also devote some time to. Please see our Excel for Productivity for information on advanced techniques in Microsoft Excel.

In the past few decades, the Internet has been explosive technique for both personal and business use. Offices use the Internet to establish networks to increase efficiency and productivity in communication. Inter office email is a way to communicate with your coworkers and other departments that may be at a different location than your own. With Manhattan Review’s course, you will learn that the Internet and email is not an intimidating concept: it is in fact very easy to learn. The Internet is also a powerful tool for marketing and publicity: Instead of submitting a press release to a print publication, which can be a lengthy process, one can upload a document to any number of PR outlets on the internet in a process that takes only seconds. Because of the heavy traffic on the Internet, organizations can use websites out other unique outlets to advertise and increase exposure without devoting, in many circumstances, more marketing dollars. 

Since we know many of you will be highly familiar with email and Internet at this point in your careers, we will be spending more time with Microsoft Office software. Microsoft Word is arguably the single most sophisticated text document-creating tool on the market. Very few business or individuals are using anything but Microsoft products for productivity and education. With Microsoft word you can create text documents that include pictures and graphs; you can also create web pages and integrate web content into your document like hyperlinks and HTML. There are formatting tools to improve the look of your text for presentation and organization purposes: You can write papers and divide it into columns to cut down on page length, create a table of contents to easily reference disparate portions of your document, insert symbols and even comments for editing purposes. You can track changes and highlight text in different colors for those documents that travel around the office to different personnel to be edited before it hits the press. There are also many, many more features that are easy to use that you probably did not know about! With our course, you will learn how to use them and when to use them to dazzle your boss with a beautifully formatted research document. We will also cover keystrokes and short cuts to maximize productivity and avoid hunting through Word’s many menus and submenus. 

Creating a research document? Learn all about the different ways to reference and cross reference in Microsoft word. Learn about Autotext for those often uses words and phrases and adjust borders and tabs. Learn to create and insert watermarks and headers to protect your intellectual property and make your work your own.

Included in the formatting section of this course will be the use of tables. Tables are a heavily relied upon formatting tool in word and even on the web. Tables will help you format and organize your text and data for easy reference and visualization purposes. Don’t want to boot Excel? Insert a table and make a mini spreadsheet on the fly in Word. 

We will also cover Microsoft Power Point, a powerful presentation tool. You will learn to create slide shows for your office presentations and even show you how to upload them to the web. You can animate your presentations for visualization purposes, or just keep it quick and simple with appropriately formatted text. Your slide shows will be more efficient in polished by switching slide with the push of a button. No more turning pages to distract your viewers.

Best of all, Microsoft boasts seamless integration between all of its products. The menus and interface look and behave the same, so with some familiarity with Word, you can move on to Excel and Power Point in no time, and with very little effort. You will be able to merge documents and data and the click of the mouse. With out course, you will achieve more than just basic familiarity with Microsoft Office Suite and your Personal Computer; you will be an office superstar, correcting the IT team in no time with your computer and Microsoft office knowledge from Manhattan Review.

Topics Covered

• Basic Internet and Email skills
• Publishing documents on the web for advertising and PR
• Basic to advanced formatting in Microsoft Word
• Creating Tables
• Inserting graphs and images into your document
• Tracking changes
• Inserting comments
• Creating an outline
• Making a table of Contents
• Create and insert Watermarks
• Borders, tabs, Columns and shading
• Auto Text
• Headers, footers and cross references
• Document and Data Merging
• Power Point Slide Shows for presentations