December 3, 2007

Andy Lambourne Moss

This week's columnist is a writer for Microsoft Office Online. Read on to get the lowdown on how and why she and the rest of the training team create the free Office Online training courses.

Did you know there are free training courses for Microsoft Office programs available on Office Online? If the answer is no, stop reading this and get over to the Training Home Page (listed in the See also box at the top of this page) to check out some of our offerings. We've got courses for both Office 2003 and the 2007 Office system programs. In this article I hope to give you a small insight into the background of our courses; why and how we create them.

Why we create training courses

There are two answers to why we create training courses. First, I'll talk about why Office Online has training courses, and second, I'll get into why I write training courses.

We began developing training courses on Office Online because we realized that some features in Office programs need more than the traditional help article. No matter how discoverable or intuitive some features try to be, sometimes it's hard to just go in and figure out things, such as using PivotTable reports, adding headers and footers, creating tables of contents, or inserting signatures automatically in Microsoft Office Outlook. And although other people were producing training courses for Office programs, we wanted to do something special for our customers.

I write training courses because I've been there — I've had my share of troubles with Office programs and at times I've been stuck. All of us who write training courses and help articles have; we weren't born at Microsoft. One of my colleagues, Judi, tells a story of how, late one evening, with a report to hand off the next day, she couldn't get the headers and footers in her document to work properly. The program's help was not helpful in her situation of starting from scratch. Of course, (I hasten to add before all my help colleagues come around to see me with their baseball bats), Office help itself has changed a lot since then. Now, when Judi's creating a new course, she remembers that dreadful night and thinks how to explain a new feature from scratch or from start to finish.

The other reason I like creating courses is that as an interfering busy-body type of person, I like to tell people how things work: "If only I could show them, or even better, have them open the program and work along side them."

In a training course I can do that. A lesson tells you all about the process, then there's a practice session with lead-along steps to let you try it yourself in the program, followed by a test to check that you did understand. Plus, I have so much more freedom to use a few more words to explain a complex process than is normally acceptable in a help topic.

How we create training courses

We do lots of research to find out what courses you want. We look at customer feedback (yes, we do read those comments from the feedback page). We look at your pain points from other data. We look at what other content publishers are producing for Office training. The product teams (the people who actually design and write the code for the products) might ask us to cover something. My mother has even been known to ask for a particular course. Then we start writing.

We go through a planning phase and get lots of feedback from our writing colleagues as well as product experts. Then we write a full storyboard, which is again checked by experts before going through a full edit. We include lots of art to help explain things in a clear manner; sometimes this might be explaining what you see in the Office program. This image below, from the training course "Up to speed with Outlook 2007," is all about explaining the layout of the new Ribbon, which is part of the Microsoft Office Fluent user interface in Outlook:

And other times it could be a conceptual piece to explain a process, or just to have a bit of light relief. This one is from "Prepare for the holidays: Write and send a newsletter with Word," and is an art project for the children to do while you create the holiday newsletter:

We've also introduced animations so that we can show you precisely how something works in the program.

A training course is laid out in a very specific way. It's designed to help you learn, practice, and remember. In our courses you will find:

• An overview page to tell you what the course is about and how long it should take (very roughly!).
• One or more lessons, made up of several pages, which are the main body of explanatory information.
• A practice session so that you can try out what you've just read about. Not every lesson or course has practices, but most do.
• A test page to check what you've remembered.
• A Quick Reference Card for you to print and refer to in the future.
• A feedback page, so you can tell us what you thought of the course and give us ideas for more.

One of our striving concerns is to keep it simple. If we can't explain a complex process in a way that you can understand and use, then either we've failed or the feature is too complicated. If this means having procedures spelled out to very granular levels, then that's what we do. And the good news is that you, our customers, seem to like what we do.

If you haven't already taken an Office Online training course, scoot over, sometime soon, to the Training Home Page, and see if there's anything of interest. And please let us know what you think of it by filling in the feedback page.

About the author

Andy Lambourne Moss is a writer on the training team. She works mainly on Microsoft Office Word and general Office topics such as accessibility and security with occasional forays into the undergrowth of Excel and OneNote. A British native, she wages an ongoing battle to change the spelling habits of all the other writers on the team. When not slaving over a hot computer, Andy spends her time doing jigsaw puzzles, Lego, and colouring with her two small children.