What are the most important Microsoft Office skills?
Asked by kid_at_heart
My mom wants to reenter the work world but she is not proficient with Microsoft Office. If we wanted to help teach her some skills with tutorials, what specifically should she focus on so that she can apply for a wider range of jobs? If you could put together a program of tutorials, what sorts of lessons would be included? She would like a clerical/receptionist position.

Best Answer:
Clerical and receptionist positions are tough to come by because most executives do their own word processing and most companies have automated switchboards (press 1 for english and 2 for spanish, etc.) She should, however, learn the following MS Office programs in this order: Word, Excel, and maybe Access. In Excel she should learn as many of the mathematical formulas as possible, along with how to create meaningful graphs of data. The data could come from databases created using MS Access. Microsoft provides plenty of tutorials on their website for each of their products. Good luck!

The two most important, right off the bat are MS Office and MS Excel. Office is the word processing software that she will type letters, etc. Excel is used to create spreadsheets for management. After that, she might learn MS Powerpoint which is used to make presentations. Hope this helps! You can email questions at mike@directyourcareer.com and I will answer them for free, or you can read my blog at the same domain name. Take care, Mike
Answered by Michael A