Wednesday, 3 June 2015

Save 50% with the Buddy Scheme!

Save 50% with the Buddy Scheme!

Buddy Save Scheme

Book a place on one of our open courses and bring a colleague along for half price

That's right, book any one of our open courses (it doesn't matter which subject or level) and you can bring a colleague along with you for half the regular price!
Alternatively, you can use the second place for yourself or a colleague for one of our regular Excel public courses (Introduction, Intermediate or Advanced) at a later date.
Interested? Call now on 020 7920 9500 for full details

Friday, 30 May 2014

Is Excel VBA The Correct Course For you

Who Might benefit from attending a VBA Class in Excel

If you just need to record a linear sequence of steps all you really need is a short session looking at recording in Excel.
As soon as you need the macro to make a decision you would need to understand how to structure a conditional logic statement in code

Eg. IF cell value is greater than let’s say 50000 then colour it in gold otherwise in a more tragic grey.
Then if you needed other values in the same column to be assessed you would need a line of code to offset (move) down one row and repeat the same action of colouring the cell

Then you might want to consider how will your macro know when to stop? If there are always 100 values to assess maybe 100 employees salaries you might want Excel to repeat (loop around)certain lines of code 100 times then stop. However, it could be each month there may be a different number of employees so you want the macro to run until there are no more cells with values (maybe a blank cell)
The first example would involve writing a For Loop in Code and the second one with a unknown number of employees would be described as a while loop

For loops and while Loops like IF statements require code to be written not recorded so the user would need to know the grammar rules of the programming language
Some macros involve interaction with the user. This could be responding to a message on the screen asking if they want the printing in colour or black or white or just informing them that the macro will take 30 minutes to complete and just go chill for a while. At the top end macros might involve the creation of elaborate forms.

Imagine in addition that a user was requested for date information or simply typed a date into cell in the format as “blessed year of our Lord 2009” instead of a correct date format you might want an error message or procedure to guide the users.
Whilst Excel has data validation and error handling functions without macros there is more flexibility with error handling with a macro.

It is also possible to get macro’s to run on an event. This could be a small event as the user moves from one cell to another macro’s could kick in if they make any mistakes. Alternatively if you worked on a trading desk and were expecting a file to be saved for you to work on but it was not expected to be completed until 8:00. You could alternatively, go home at 5:00 and get your macro to run on a timer event
Macro’s can also be used to create and share new functions. You could have 50 users assigning cars to staff based on three cells containing their grade, salary and length of service. Rather than having to rely upon their knowledge of conditional logic and lookup functions they could share functions on their spreadsheets making it easier to manage spreadsheet reliability than individual knowledge.

See our Course Outline EXCEL Introduction to VBA

Why Book Scheduled Training Courses


It was always easier to work with trainees who were novice users of computers.

That situation has changed over the course of time trainees have already written their thesis in Microsoft Word at University and have been exposed to Excel and PowerPoint at school.
Courses have become shorter and the syllabus more intense with little time for exercises.

All over the Internet individuals and companies are bombarded with requests to attend set  Introductory, Intermediate and Advanced courses  and the trainers cannot deviate from that structure, these company's want you to come back for the next level of course.
All too frequently, prospective candidates book themselves on unsuitable courses, sharing (sometimes very expensive) training time with other students, overqualified and unhappy by morning break.  The result is disappointed delegates at both ends of the spectrum and from experience, an exhausted trainer.

Many training companies produce course contents which don’t even align with the work requirements of the attendees and deliver ill trained individuals back to the work place.

An alternative? Absolutely.

Dear Training company Directors, Co-coordinators, schedulers…your checklist:

  1. complete training needs analyses for all candidates attending training and group candidates of the same level together.
  2. Don’t allow members of the public to certify themselves on to courses.
  3. Don’t mix clients from different organizations together on the same Course.
  4.  Do tailor the course on the basis of graded ability and vary the syllabus according to the organization’s requirements. The length of the course, the need for exercises, will be dictated by this individualization of courses.
  5. Do not force fit candidates who do not fall neatly into groups. These candidates should be taught in 1-1 sessions.

Can the scheduled course which survive certain death, maybe the the Introduction to any application but as stated at the beginning of this article, suitable candidates for this kind of course are few and far between.
If IT classroom training is to avoid being passed over in favour of on line training and that brings its own set of problems, it is going to have to adapt to a much more sophisticated audience.

PowerPoint courses demanding use of their own in house Master slides, Visio courses with their own process maps and Excel spreadsheets with relevant work based examples.
The result will take more time and preparation but the end results will be better for employer, employee and trainer. And ultimately, less comeback for you. Nothing worse than having to deal with a post course customer complaint. Especially one even you think is justified.

For a company that offers the traditional open course but also offers an alternative to those courses look no further than Charis Alexandra Training

Free Microsoft Training Manuals and Quick Key cards


There are loads of web sites claiming to offer free training manuals but when you get to the site there is always a catch

 The sites below pretty much don’t have any catches
 

Happy manuals has a whole website dedicated to providing manuals for download. It’s called Happy Manuals‘, and has all of the Happy Computers classroom manuals (currently more than 150 titles!). The manuals are free for those working in state schools. Feel free to download, and copy as often as you want, for staff and students. you seem to be fine up to office 2007 but not much beyond.

Happy Manuals is also a repository for your own manuals, and you can upload and license your own creations for download from there too!

 
Finally you can download Microsoft Training Manuals

 MS Office Training Manuals  2003.,2007 and 2010 the 2013 are just around the corner 

NEW MS Office 2007 Quick Reference Guides and Excel 2010 Training Manuals from Mouse London with no limits on their usage

Training Courses Tailored


The Tailored Training Course

Your people are your most precious asset. Yet they can only perform if they have the skills and knowledge to do their job. Little wonder then that the most successful businesses invest so much in training. And when it comes to IT training, more and more of them are turning to The Mouse London Training Company.

Our philosophy is simple. We tailor our courses around the needs of our customers, so they get the training they need to do their job.

We work for some of the biggest and best known companies in the country. Yet you’ve probably never heard of us. It’s not surprising – we don’t advertise nor do we sell ourselves aggressively. We’re proud to say that our customers keep choosing us time and time again in the face of increasing competition. And most of our new business comes through referrals from customers who are happy to pass on the word about The Mouse London Training Company.

The Mouse London Training Company can provide virtually any type of PC training you require (e.g. Microsoft Office, Microsoft Access, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Project). 2003 through to 2013 not that we get much call for office 2003
We can teach classes, or individuals one to one. We can also teach conversion courses if you are migrating from one type of software to another. We also offer a selection of open courses to keep the cost for individuals down.

We specialise in training all versions of Microsoft Office to any level, from introductory to advanced. We have standard course outlines for all our courses, but we are more than happy to tailor any of our courses to meet your company’s needs. We provide comprehensive manuals and a complimentary 30 day post-course telephone support service with every Microsoft Office course.

Please call us  on 020 7628 0415 or email to receive a full brochure containing details of our courses or to discuss your specific requirements. Mouse London is part of the CAT Training LTD Group

Fonts missing in Word 2013 / Word 2010

Fonts missing in Word 2013
not so much of a problem as it was in office 2010 as we have the one note default printer but if you do have problems use the same solution as below.

To get free training Materials visit . free training materials


Fonts missing in Word 2010
 
it was reported today that a laptop had no fonts in MS Word 2010 symptoms powerpoint and excel fonts are present but the fonts in word only show generic system fonts, this is caused but no specific printer being instaled. Here is the solution Add a printer. when adding a printer select the HP Laser Jet, the drivers for this are pre installed on windows so no problems loading this corrects the problem, now re launch word and all fonts are present good luck.
Mouse London is the soft skills arm of the it software training company charis Alexandra Training.
www.catrainingltd.co.uk