Week 4: MS Excel

I would say that I know enough about Excel to call myself an expert, but also enough to say that I have a ways to go.  Excel might be the most powerful program of the Microsoft Office Suit.  Believe it or not, my expertise in Excel is not because of school, science, graphing, college, or anything else you would predict.  My expertise comes from fantasy baseball.  Over the years, my fantasy baseball league has developed into a very intense league, where we have to auction each player, budget money, and keep some players from year to year.  In order to keep pace with the other league managers (all of which are my brother's friends from Dartmouth and outsmart me in every way - including 2 Jeopardy winners) I had to learn Excel's secrets.  I learned conditional formatting, which is very useful during a draft to display which players have been taken already.  I also used it to point out which players had good stats in different categories, and which categories I was weak in compared to other teams during the draft  I also learned a lot about logic functions.  I created many different formulas, often using the help feature of Microsoft.  I learned the Rank, IF, COUNTIF, SUMIF, among many others.
Even though I feel very confident with Excel, I still would like to learn other features.  I know that learning how to create Macros would be very helpful, along with Pivot Tables.  Hopefully over one of the school breaks I will be able to explore these other tools.

Week 3: MS Word

Sorry for the late blog.
I have a lot of experience using Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, but these tutorials are still wonderful.  I know at my old job, they were clueless when it came to MS Office, and I will be sending them the tutorial links since they don't have me to answer all their questions anymore.
In college I used MS Word mostly as a word processor and worksheet creator, and but senior year we had a wonderful senior chemistry project where we fully utilized the review features.  This was my first experience using the comments and tracking tools.  We had groups of 4, and when each person wrote their rough draft, we had to correct them and send back.  I know that my profession thanked my for my hard work on one student's paper specifically.  But I also loved having feedback from 3 other people that was so easy to access.  It was much simpler to edit using computerized suggestions than hand written remarks.
Mail merge is something new for me, and I'm not sure how often I will use it.  There are some possible side-jobs that I might try and get where I would use that feature, or letters home to parents.  We'll have to see how my life plays out.