LearnKey Blog

Microsoft Office 2016’s “Tell Me” Feature

Hello everyone! Office 2016, released last fall, is not a major upgrade over Office 2013, but it does have some nice new features. Over the next few months, this blog space will occasionally introduce a few of those features as we coincide this with our producing an entire suite of Office 2016 courses this summer.

All of our Office 2016 courses will get you ready for both the Microsoft Office Specialist certification for Office 2016 (due out later this year) and, more importantly for many of you, get you job-ready for any position requiring proficiency in Microsoft Office. We will be building courses for Word 2016, Excel 2016, PowerPoint 2016, Outlook 2016, and Access 2016. I am lining up on-camera outfits to color-coordinate with the theme colors of Office as we speak (OK, maybe I’m not but you will have to get the courses to find out).

Anyway, here is a new feature in Office 2016: the “Tell me” feature. This is a big enhancement over the standard help feature as you can click in the “Tell me what you want to do” box. In Excel 2016, it looks just like this:

Tell me what you want to do button

So, you can click in the box and type a phrase for what you want to do. In this example, I typed “add a page break” and look what I got:

Add a page break screenshot

Needless to say, this is a big help in the Help feature (pun intended). Keep checking back for updates on our suite of Office 2016 courses.

The Power of Certification

Sometimes it’s good to take a morning away . . . away from the office, away from the desk, away from the computer.

Tuesday morning, I did just that. I took a morning away from LearnKey to speak to the Web Design class at Parowan High School in Parowan, Utah.

My wife is a student teacher at Parowan High School, and when her mentor teacher learned that I work as a Web Designer she asked if I would be willing to come talk to the class. She wanted someone in the local community to give her students a “real world” perspective on the concepts they are studying in class.

Presenting to the students at Parowan High School

The world tells us that we can become anything we want to be. Therefore, the world tells us that anyone can become a web designer. The world often fails to mention that while everyone can become a web designer, not everyone will become a good web designer. Like any other profession, to become a good web designer a person must put in a lot of hard work and dedication (a little bit of natural artistic talent doesn’t hurt either).

As an artistic professional (yes, web design is an art form), I can’t always remember the fundamentals of designing a good website. As in many other professions, the elements of good design became instinctual over time and I subconsciously implement them in every design I create. As a result, I had to re-learn the proper terms for things that have become second nature to me. I had to re-educate myself before I could properly give a presentation on the elements of a good design. LearnKey’s Web Site Design Course provides a great introduction to these important concepts and teaches students how to use the tools necessary to succeed in a web design career.

Education is a large part of what it takes to succeed in any field of employment. Even so, with the large number of people looking for work, a proper education may not be enough to set you apart from other job seekers. It’s the seemingly simple things that set candidates apart, things like extra training and industry certifications.

At LearnKey, we understand the need to rise above the competition. Many of our courses are geared toward preparing students for certification, whether they’re interested in the Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Office, or CompTIA’s A+ Certification. Our primary goal is to provide quality expert-led training that will enable students to get certified at a pace that works for them. LearnKey’s courseware is carefully mapped to exam objectives, with project manuals and practice tests to reinforce concepts taught in the training.

I guess even on my morning away I couldn’t stay away from LearnKey or its mission.

Thanks again to Deveny Pace and Nicole Washburn for allowing me to take up their valuable class time.