Today I was training OneNote in Wellingborough. To truly appreciate One Note you really have to use it. OK, now I hear what you're saying that might sound like the blooming obvious but... Some trainers simply go through the manual and conduct what I call a "SatNav" training course. (You follow the steps in the Manual to get a result but you've no Idea of you did it). First of all what is OneNote? Well imagine a notebook that you can take anywhere. On your phone, tablet or even your Computer. Whenever and wherever you take a note it will remember it. You can then bring back the note so long as you have a device connected to the Internet. You can use it in conjunction with Excel or Outlook, synchronising meeting notes with the Outlook calendar.
0 Comments
On a beginners Excel course near Northampton I conducted on Monday I was wondering the answer to that question. The majority of people when using Excel will use the mouse to click away after they have entered information in a cell. It's sort of a habit with some, they don't even know that they are doing it. However when they are in the middle of a formula they find that using the mouse to click away can create a lot of headaches. They watch in dismay as Excel selects different cells and their formula falls to pieces before their very eyes. I always train beginners to use the mouse when selecting cells to be included in formulas. But when they've completed the formula, and they are happy with it, pressing enter is the only way to complete the formula.
You visit a client and they show you the data that they want to use for a particular training session. However when you look through the data you can see that there are some issues with the information. You know the typical issues. One of which is adding months or years as column headers. Then, when they want to add a new month they add another column header. This they do, going on and on, until they have a spreadsheet that is ludicrously wide and unmanageable. They haven't a hope of creating a pivot table or doing anything else with it for that matter. On an advanced level Excel training course in Cambridge I had that very problem. Trouble is how do you tell the client? Well there is no need to be rude, laughing and deriding them as a bunch of amateurs. After all, we all had to learn this, and some like me learnt the hard way. The best way to teach them is to take a small piece of their data and show the benefits of constructing the data in the correct format. The psychology department is a strange place to conduct an Excel training course. However there I was, training at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, surrounded by with strange head-like objects. Including this strange head pinpointing various areas of the brain. I'm sure that there is a pivot table gland in the brain and I believe that some of the students tapped into that today. |
The art of trainingI've seen many things the good the bad and the darn right ugly. Not that perfection in training is anything I've achieved but sometimes a bit of empathy and common sense can make the person you're training feel at ease and aid training. Archives
October 2020
Categories |