Lesson 3 – Microsoft 101

Microsoft 101

To simplify using the most common Microsoft Office products; Microsoft 365, Office 365, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. We also explain Microsoft Teams, Cloud Computing, and Microsoft Forms.

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Lesson Resources – Microsoft 101 Handout

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Video Transcript – Microsoft 101

Objectives: To simplify using the most common Microsoft Office products; Microsoft 365, Office 365, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. We also explain Microsoft Teams, Cloud Computing, and Microsoft Forms.

“Welcome to Microsoft 101! In this module, we’ll give you overview of Microsoft 365 and the Microsoft Office suite of products. This is one of the most important videos in the course. Your reading handout goes into greater detail the points made in this video.

Microsoft was founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975 in the US and grew into a leading global technology corporation. Microsoft came to dominate the personal computer operating system market with MS-DOS, the operating system it introduced in the mid-1980s, followed by Windows 95, which radically changed what people saw on their computers – changing it from a simple green screen with lines of text to a streamlined graphical user interface.

Windows made it so much easier to find files, documents, and photos that the software has been installed on over a billion PCs worldwide! So, let’s take a look at some of the most common Microsoft applications: namely, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft PowerPoint.

You may already be familiar with Microsoft Word, commonly referred to as Word. We’ll look at Word and explain why it is so popular. In essence, Word is like a virtual typewriter; it enables you to organise and write documents effectively. You can change the look, size, and density of fonts in a Word document, enabling you to present it as you please.

Creating a new Word document is simple. Firstly, click on the Word icon to open the Microsoft Word app. From here, select ‘Blank Document,’ which presents a basic template, in which you can design and type in whatever you wish. You can get quite creative, and use tables, images, custom fonts, and shapes to present your work.

It’s important to remember to save your work! Many people have been caught out by spending hours (and hours and hours!) writing a document only to find that the power goes out for a second and all the work is lost. So, try to always remember to save your work as you go along… It’s as simple as clicking on the “Save” button from time to time. When you save your document for the first time, give it a meaningful file name; this not only helps to locate the file more easily, but also to distinguish its contents at a glance.

To open a document within Word, select the “File” option from the toolbar and click “Open.” From there, navigate around your computer to locate the saved file.

When you need to collaborate with others, you can use the Microsoft Teams app (known as Teams) – this enables you to chat, video conference and form a community in which you can work remotely, sharing ideas and content. Teams also enables you to have video meetings. We’ll talk more about that in the Online Meetings Module.

These applications are all now available in the Cloud, which you can think of as a way of working on a file that is located somewhere else: although you are looking at it on the screen in front of you, the file’s software and content is on the internet.

Microsoft Forms enables you to create forms. Much like a normal paper form, like the type you fill out when you first go to the doctor, a Microsoft Form is virtual: instead of filling out the form on paper, you fill it out on a computer…

Have you ever had to do a presentation? Well, Microsoft has you covered here, too. PowerPoint is a set of virtual slides that allows you to present a story to an audience. Each slide can contain text, videos, sound, and images. It is a powerful way of presenting a visual idea to an audience to capture their imagination.

Next, we’ll look at Microsoft Excel, a powerful tool known as a spreadsheet. Excel looks like a grid of rows and columns. It allows you to organise, format and calculate data on a large scale. With Excel, you can import all the financial data of an organisation and calculate the profit and loss (for example) at the click of a button. You can do amazing things with Excel, including add, subtract, and sum rows of numbers instantly, which can save enormous amounts of time and effort.

We recommend that you work through the accompanying handout in front of your computer, to get a solid overview on Microsoft products, as they can save you a great deal of time going forward!”