At my work, I have an employee that struggles with several aspects of the office work parts of the job. She’s got almost no basic computer literacy, and only recently was able to create new folders consistently. She also can’t really use Excel at all.
She wants to learn, and I spent my whole youth on computers, but I can’t spare the hours to teach her everything from the ground up at work. I’ve done a little YouTube searching to check for basic computing tutorials, but I haven’t found anything at a basic enough level yet to be useful to her. I’m sure they exist, but are just eluding me. I think for her, something she can watch and maybe follow along with might be the best option.
Give a woman a YouTube video, and she acquires a new shortcut. Teach a woman to effectively use Google, she acquires everything.
We didn’t roll out of the womb with this knowledge. We just aggressively Google. I’ve reached a point where I’ve stopped helping people if they haven’t done that step first since that’s basically all I’m gonna do. Might not get them what they need every time, but it will clear up a LOT of simple issues.
The for dummies books are good if they don’t want to learn online
This is one of my favorite resources for this exact type of scenario: https://edu.gcfglobal.org/en/
She’ll have to get a computer and use it in her free time instead of a phone. It’s the best way
Excel is a problem since it changes constantly and relies so much on the mouse. I’m a developer and struggle every time I’m forced to use it.
Search engines have also gotten terrible over the last few years so it’s a pretty bad time to learn how to use a computer. Old videos from the 90s and 2000s are great to learn the basics, but unfortunately you can’t really follow along.
Paid courses for the basics of MS office exist, maybe you’ll be able to find one that starts from zero and teaches the basics of using a computer at all.
I love excel. So much so that I grabbed a handful of for dummies books about it, abaorbed them, and moved on to vba.
It’s not that it is necessarily easy, but moreso brutally satisfying to be able to swear at a worksheet triumphantly once you’ve wrangled something obscene.
Currently refreshing with 2019 power programming in vba and two older ones, sql for dummies+ crystal reports for dummies. Crystal reports is goddamn brutal to learn, but fuck is it good.
It’s also kinda fun trying to explain sql tables to people. For context, I’m in accounting but got real tired of all the manual formatting shit I used to have to do. It set me down the path to figure out why things sucked so hard. It’s coming in handy at my new job. I might eventually haggle for a custom title of Spreadsheet Developer lol
Also, archive.org has a bunch of reference books on miscellaneous computer stuff. It’s where I grabbed most of mine. They had a lawsuit recently so some of the books are unavailable but hopefully op can dig up something useful.
Udemy or Khan Academy courses might help. I haven’t searched for the computer skills courses, but both have a good reputation.
She has to be willing to learn and that will take time and patience.
