Online distance training has become very popular, as it provides learners with the ability to learn what they want and whenever they want. However, instructor led training has its own significant benefits and has stayed very popular even in this digital age. Let us look at 4 advantages of instructor led training.
 

Instructor-led training is a form of training which involves an instructor providing live training to an individual or to a group of students. It could be run in an office, classroom or conference room using lectures, presentations, demonstrations, interactive workshops, discussions and it could be run even virtually, utilising video-conferencing tools.
 
So what are the benefits?
 
The Instructor

The most important asset in an instructor-led program is the instructor himself. A well-educated and experienced professional can add a lot of value to a courseware, as they share their knowledge on the subject to enrich learning.
 
The instructor is not only fully qualified in the subjects they teach, but also in the general principles of training itself. For example, if you are having difficulty learning something, they can use a variety of techniques such as role-play, games or exercises to enhance your learning experience and help you get back on track.
 
Questions & Real-Time Feedback

Another advantage of instructor-led training is the opportunity to ask questions directly and get immediate feedback. This could be a challenge if you were on a distant learning program, as you might have to wait to get an answer and in some cases you don’t get a reply at all. Sometimes if your question is unclear and needs further clarification, it could be weeks before you get the correct answer. All of it negatively impacts your learning, as while you are waiting you are not able to progress with your study.
 
Learning from Peers

Instructor-led training generally takes place in a classroom, which gives the students the advantage of learning from their peers. Learning in a group is not only enjoyable, but it facilitates retention of learning, deeper understanding of new concepts, and increased informal learning. Sharing ideas, group discussions, and debating with peers can further develop knowledge, particularly in practical application of the subject. Furthermore, since some delegates on a course are advanced users the entire group benefits from their experience and knowledge.
 
Time of Learning

Learning in a classroom is quicker than online. This is because a course has been structured and planned out and takes into consideration years of experience of delivering the course to people with different styles of learning.
 
Likewise, training in a classroom will help you to concentrate, because you are away from potential distractions such as phone calls or television. Enabling you to concentrate more on study may help you to understand course material better and as a result get through it quicker.
 
Moreover, your class mates motivates you to continue your study. This is particular useful for someone who is likely to procrastinate or study at the last minute.
 
Despite being the most expensive form of training, Instructor Led Training, as demonstrated above, has its distinctive advantages. So make sure you are choosing the best training provider, to guarantee that you receive good value for money.

How many times have you done it? You’ve sent an email to someone and realised that either you forgot to attach an important document or you sent it to the wrong person!

Wondering what to do? You can either just recall the original message or recall and replace it. The success or failure of a recall depends on the recipients’ settings in Microsoft Office Outlook.

Follow this procedure:

1. From Mail, in the Navigation Pane, click Sent Items.
2. Find the message that you want to recall and open it.
3. On the Message tab, in the Actions group, click Other Actions, and then click Recall This Message.
4. Click Delete unread copies of this message

 

Or

 

Click Delete unread copies and replace with a new message. Click OK, and then type a new message and/or include the attachment. Click Send.

 

You may want to clear the Tell me if recall succeeds or fails for each recipient box, if you are sending the message to a large number of people.

 

The above does not guarantee that the recall will be successful, however it is worth to try!

Want more tips? Click on Microsoft Outlook Tips and Tricks

Sometimes you may want to mark major event in a project, for example indicate the beginning and end of the project or display the end of a major phase. You can use milestones to do that. To create a milestone follow the steps:

1. In Gantt Chart View, in the Task Name column, type the name of a milestone
2. In the Duration column type 0 and press ENTER

In the Gantt Chart the task will be displayed as a black diamond symbol ¿.

Want more tips? Click on Microsoft Project Tips and Tricks

Let’s say you’ve just applied various formatting options to text, for example you might have selected bold, italic, underline; changed font and size of font; applied a different colour, added borders and shading, and even adjusted different line spacing. Now you would like to quickly reproduce this formatting in several places in your document.

You can save time by copying the format you’ve already applied to text using Format Painter. To do so follow these steps:

1. Select the text that has the formatting that you want to duplicate.
2. On the ribbon from Home tab, in Clipboard, click the Format Painter button. When you move from the Ribbon back to the document, the mouse pointer now appears as I-beam with a paint brush.
3. Select the text you want to reformat by dragging the mouse to highlight the text.
4. As soon as you release the mouse button, the text receives the format of the other text. The feature is turned off and the mouse pointer returns to the original default pointer.

If you have several pieces of the text throughout the document that you want to reformat, then follow steps 1 to 3, however in step 2, double click the Format Painter button and select text to format those pieces of text. When you’re finished, click the Format Painter button to turn it off.

Want more tips? Click on Microsoft Word Tips & Tricks

While entering data in Excel worksheet you may find yourself using the keyboard a lot. If you take your hands off the keyboard to use the mouse, it will slow you down. An alternative is to use keyboard shortcuts instead of a mouse. Below are my 10 most favoured key shortcuts in Excel 2007! To use them, simply press two keys shown in the brackets < > simultaneously.

<Ctrl> + <A> – Selects an entire worksheet

<Ctrl> + <C> – Copies the selected cells

<Ctrl> + <V> – Pastes the selected cells

<Ctrl> + <X> – Cuts the selected cells

<Ctrl> + <Z> – Undoes the previous command, if possible

<Ctrl> + <Y> (or <F4>) – Repeats the last command or action, if possible.

<Ctrl> + <S> – Saves the current work

<F2> – Enables editing within a cell

<F11> – Creates a chart from the selected data.

<Alt> + <=> Inserts the AutoSum function.

If you are working on a very important worksheet, use <Ctrl> + <S> regularly to prevent your data from being lost accidentally.

Want more tips? Click on Microsoft Excel Tips & Tricks

When I first time saw Microsoft Excel 2007 I thought I have a new annoying task to do – to learn excel. But after some playing with it I’ve realised how much I like this software. As time has gone by I prefer it. Here are 5 reasons why I prefer Excel 2007 to previous versions.

New level of limits

Microsoft Office Excel 2007 supports 1,048,576 rows and 16,384 columns. The number of rows has increased from roughly 65536 to 1.1 million; the number of columns has increased from 256 to over 16385! Columns now end at XFD instead of IV.

Office Excel 2007 also supports up to 16 million colours, which enhance visual appearance of graphic elements.

Improved sorting and filtering

Excel has always included sorting and filtering tools. With Excel 2007, the sorting and filtering options have been expanded. For example, you can now sort data by colour or by up to 64 levels (previously, you were limited to 3 levels).

Data can be filtered by colour or by dates. The AutoFilter dropdown list now displays more than 1000 items to choose from and multiple items to filter are available. Filtering capabilities can also be applied to data in PivotTables.

Powerful data visualisation tool

Do you need to highlight data when you are over or under budget or want to draw attention to the important data from a huge list?

With enhanced conditional formatting features you can highlight trends in your data, find the highest and lowest data, find exceptions and annotate data into categories. Using colour scales, data bars and performance indication icons will help you to achieve this.

Easy to use PivotTables and Pivot Charts

No need anymore to drag data into drop zones, just select the fields that you want to see in a new PivotTable field list.

And after you’ve created a PivotTables enjoy easy sorting and filtering data within PivotTable data or apply conditional formatting.

PivotCharts are also much easier to create than before. The chart formatting that you apply will be maintained when you make changes to the PivotChart, which is a significant improvement from previous versions of Excel.

New Functions are added

Microsoft Excel 2007 has 343 functions with 51 new functions. New functions mainly are within 2 new categories – Engineering (39 functions) and Cube (7 functions). The remaining five are IFRROR, AVERAGEIF, AVERAGEIFS, SUMIFS, COUNTIFS

So, really Excel 2007 is the must to upgrade for everyone using Excel. And you know that Excel training will help you to learn those tricks to make your business life easier.

Want to know more how Microsoft Excel can help you? Click on Microsoft Excel Articles.

In Why to Use Microsoft Office Diagnostics we discussed the benefits and diagnostics options available. Here we are going to discuss how to use the diagnostics.

Before you start the diagnostics:

• Run the diagnostics when you do not need to use your computer
• Make sure you are connected to the Internet
• Close other programmes
• Make sure you have Microsoft Office installation disk in case there are problems and your program will need an access to the disk to repair

If Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Access are still working then to start the Microsoft Office Diagnostics follow the steps:

1. Click the Microsoft Office Button , and then click Word Options (or Excel Options or PowerPoint Options or Access Options)
2. Click Resources
3. Click the Diagnose button
4. Click Continue, and then click Run Diagnostics.

If InfoPath, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher, Project, SharePoint Designer, or Visio are still working then to start the Microsoft Office Diagnostics follow the steps

1. On the Help menu, click Office Diagnostics.
2. Click Continue, and then click Start Diagnostics.

If any of the above programmes has crashed so badly that they not start, you can run Office Diagnostics from the Start menu.

1. In Windows, click the Start button
2. Point to All Programs, then to Microsoft Office and then to Microsoft Office Tools
3. Select Microsoft Office Diagnostics

To check which tests are available read Tips and Tricks: Microsoft Office 2007 – Why Use Microsoft Office Diagnostics?

Want more tips? Click on Microsoft Tips & Tricks

Ever looked at your list of tasks wondering what to do first? Well, you are not alone.

The Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923) suggested that the results and the causes of those results are unequally distributed in the ratio of 80:20. The Pareto Principle, more commonly referred as the 80/20 Rule, states that:

•  
  • 20% of your activities will generate 80% of your success, or
  • 20% of a well time managed effort will generate 80% of the desired results.

Although the ratio 80/20 is not always this precise, it is used to put emphasis on how much is lost or how much can be gained with time management. It is not a surprise that identifying the critical 20% is the key factor to success.

A simple Time Management course can certainly help you to learn some tips and tricks and teach you using your time efficiently. But what can we do NOW to minimise our time wastage?

The key in identifying those critical 20% is by prioritising your tasks. You may use the Eisenhower Method to help you with that. It said that former U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower used this method in prioritising his daily tasks.

To determine your priorities you will need to use a matrix, where you evaluate each task according to its Importance and Urgency. If you use this matrix then you will need to focus on Important tasks. If your tasks are

• Important and Urgent, then do them immediately
• Important but Not Urgent, then enter them into your calendar to keep track of them
• Urgent and Not Important, then delegate them to a competent person
• Not Urgent and Not Important are time wasters, so minimise them

This is common sense but you would be surprised how much this method will positively affect your productivity. For more info, read our future blog articles, or come to our Effective Time Management Courses and seminars.

So, you almost finished adding your tasks to your project plan and you are willing to display a project summary task. Here is a tip on how to do that.

1. From the Menu commands, select Tools and then Options
2. Click on the View tab and in the Oultine options for ‘Project x’ select Show project summary task check box to show the project summary task

The project summary task will appear before the task list in the Task Name column. If you want to change the name of the project summary task, select it and type the desired text.

Want more tips? Click on Microsoft Project Tips & Tricks

You probably get used to selecting text horizontally from left to right or right to left, for example, to format or copy it. For the left to right selection, click just before the beginning of a word, and while holding the mouse button down, drag to the end of the section that you want to highlight. For the right to left selection doing everything backwards achieves the same result. But what if you want to select a text vertically, for example, to apply some formatting to the first 2 words in the text of each line as on a picture? Here’s a handy tip.

You can select the text vertically. In order to do that, just hold down the <Alt> key on a keyboard whilst you are selecting the text as usually. You will get this result.

Now you can apply any formatting to it (here we selected Chicago font style).

Although in the example above we selected text at the beginning of the lines, you can make vertical selections anywhere on the page.

Want more tips? Click on Microsoft Word Tips & Tricks