Update to the Excel course notes

Hello, everyone.
It’s been a while, but I’ve finally added a section to the Excel course notes about using the “Fill” function.
The example I use in the notes is filling some cells with a range of dates, starting from today’s date.
Hopefully we can cover this topic in greater detail during the training.

Twitter

Good morning, everyone.
It has been a long time since I last posted to the blog, but a lot of things have happened.
Firstly, the training topics for this year’s course have been finalised. I shall post them to a new page on the blog soon.
Finally, we have decided to teach the Twitter messaging service if there’s enough time. For those of you who don’t know, Twitter is a kind of quick blogging service. You can post short messages about what you are doing now, and your friends can see and respond to them. Twitter is a good way to keep in touch with you friends and work colleagues, and it is also a lot of fun. We’d like to teach it together with making a blog.
Please look out for additions to the Excel and Skype tutorials in the near future. Also, I’m hoping to post some notes about Windows Live Messenger and Windows Live Mail before the course starts.

More on training topics for the 2008 workshop

Good evening, everyone.
Since my last post about the 2008 training schedule, the topics and dates have now been finalized.
The Penang part of the course will start on Wednesday the 30th of July, and end on Thursday the 21st of August.
The trainees will probably arrive in Penang on Monday the 28th of July, and we shall all travel to Japan together on Saturday the 23rd of August.
Regarding the training topics, we hope to cover the following:

• Microsoft Word 2007 (beginner to advanced)
• Microsoft Excel 2007 (beginner to intermediate)
• Microsoft Powerpoint 2007 (beginner to intermediate)
• Browsing the web with Internet Explorer
• E-mail with Windows Mail
• Instant messaging and voice-chatting with Skype
• Burning, ripping and playing music (we haven’t decided on the software application yet)
• How to make a blog
• How to make a podcast
• How to use the free screen reader NVDA
• How to use other free and open-source software, like Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird
• Computer security with AVG antivirus and a firewall (again, we haven’t yet decided which firewall to use).

Of course, we will also cover using Microsoft Windows Vista and how to get the most out of Jaws for Windows.
Please watch this space for more details as they become available.

What the trainees will learn this year

Good evening, everyone.
This is just a quick post to tell you all that the schedule for the 2008 training is now being decided.
This year, the trainees will not only learn about Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft Powerpoint, but they will also make a weblog and create their own podcast.
As you may know, weblogs (or blogs) and podcasts are a very convenient way to publish information on the Internet, so we’re happy to teach these skills.
We shall probably use WordPress to make the blog, and Garage Cast to make the podcast, although this is not yet definite.
Please check back often for more information about the topics we intend to cover in this year’s training.

Training with Windows Vista

Good morning, everyone.
It’s been a long time since I’ve last posted to the blog, but I thought that this year’s trainees might like to know that we’ve decided to use Windows Vista Home Premium with Jaws for Windows version 9.
Until this year, we’ve used Windows XP Professional, but Microsoft will stop selling Windows XP in June of this year, so it’s time to move to Vista.
Vista works in a very similar way to XP, but there are some differences that we’ll have to study.
Anyway, I think that this is a very exciting chance for the 2008 trainees to gain experience using the very latest operating system from Microsoft.