Improve your computer skills: consider online training

It can be difficult to keep up with all of the changes in technology. How many of you are using Microsoft Office 2010? Or how about Office 2007? Office 2003? Training can help you keep up, but who has the extra time to go to a training session? Do you even have access to quality training in your area? What about your support staff?

One of the ways you can get training with less hassle is to use online training courses like those offered at Lynda.com. Online courses offer the opportunity to learn on your own at your own pace. You can do it whenever you have the time and it can be done in small chunks. Some of the training clips are as short as a couple of minutes. Click on this link to go to an example course on Microsoft Word 2010 Essentials. The blue links in the outline are live example portions of the training. With these small easily digestible chunks you really can sneak in some training at any time (even on your smart phone). Didn’t quite pick up on the concept? Just replay the clip.

Lynda.com offers a variety of training on almost any general computer software and also some topics that are not computer-related (photography, for instance). Unfortunately I don’t see any courses on legal-specific software, but I think all of us use basics like Outlook, Word, Excel and Powerpoint at some point. And they have tons of courses 0n a variety of programs (Photoshop, Picasa, QuickBooks Pro, Twitter and Facebook just to name a few). You can access the complete library for $25 a month.

If the idea of doing the training over the Internet does not appeal to you, or if your Internet connection is slow, they also offer some of their training via DVD.

Lynda.com is not the only option out there (i.e. ClipTraining), but it is one that I am familiar with and have used successfully. Regardless of what training method you use it is always good to continue to learn. The more you know and understand your software, the better chance you have of being more efficient in your use of it. And being more productive is the reason we are using these computers in the first place.