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Some employers are inferring they want you to have "advanced" knowledge of MS Office. For example, I learned a lot of Excel in college, but not a lot of the advanced stuff. I would consider myself more advanced now with a few years of practice.
A lot of people don't know basics in Excel, even younger folks my age (early-mid 20's) who are college educated. A lot of my friends who were non business/math/engineering/what have you major's had little to no instruction in MS Office outside of word and powerpoint.
i remember learning flash and spss on my own because i had certain dreams i wanted to accomplish that would require a strong mastery. i've since forgotten how to do anything truly complex on flash, but i can still use spss in an extremely advanced fashion. i never really had to bother with excel education-wise, but picked up basic-basics on my own. office seems pretty basic for everyone who is going to work in any kind of office/desk capacity...can't picture people not being able to use it at least a little...just a little...
You graduate college in the late 80s or early 90s, which probably puts you in your 40s or 50s.
And yes, I do know how to use them.
God, if one graduated from college in 80s or 90s and doesn't know how to use Office it means he/she has been hiding under a rock all these years. I mean come on one cant live without Office pretty much like one can't live without a phone. People do online banking, keep track of things, write letters. Even if these things were not taught in college back then you learn and go with the flow. Iphone didn't exist back then. So people in their 40s and 50s shouldn't use them?
I think this is more like a standard question remaining from the dinosaurs era and needs to be purged. Everybody know how to use excel, even school children. And if there is a feature one doesn't know there's help and YouTube videos that covers it.
One thing Ive noticed is that younger people tend to embrace learning technology in the workplace. Whereas the older crowd tends to avoid learning it. Ive seen this firsthand where the manager will pay for the whole office to go to an Access course and the older folks will bail. I constantly have to teach the managers here how to pivot, lookup, sumif, etc.
Shucks. I'm in my 50s work with clients around the country and I've needed Excel about three times in my entire career. At some point, people are more interested in your ability to analyze and think as opposed to pressing the keys on a keyboard.
God, if one graduated from college in 80s or 90s and doesn't know how to use Office it means he/she has been hiding under a rock all these years.
You misunderstand the OP's question, which was: "How do you even graduate college without knowing these programs?"
It would have been a little tricky to learn Microsoft Office before graduating if you graduated from college before the program existed, now, wouldn't it?
Depending on what year/version MS Office a particular employer uses, it can be like learning it all over again. Every time a new version comes out, MS decides to move things all around, create new directories and bury things commonly used 6 directories deep. lol
If a significant portion of the position is designing databases, I'd think that the employer would be specific about wanting Access skills as opposed to just Office. That's a very different type of skill than knowing Word or Excel.
I used to do data collation for a health insurance company. The easiest way to get the data into Access was to import it into Excel, then save it to a data file. Once it was in Access, I could generate a variety of reports, some for sales, some for billing, some for management. Some of it ended up in Power Point presentations. You can do a lot with Office beyond writing and printing documents. I have to admit that I'm retired and don't use MS Office any more, because I don't like the new versions. Most of my documents were loaded with macros, and Word doesn't allow macros any more. In retirement, LibreOffice is good enough for me, and it's free.
One thing Ive noticed is that younger people tend to embrace learning technology in the workplace. Whereas the older crowd tends to avoid learning it. Ive seen this firsthand where the manager will pay for the whole office to go to an Access course and the older folks will bail.
I'm stunned that anyone would turn down free training in anything job related. 100-yrs ago, I worked as a secretary in HR for a commodities firm. I went through 1-wk of account exec training, even though I had no intention of ever doing such a job. My boss felt it would help me to better understand the industry. She was right. I was a kid & honestly, was overjoyed to sit in class rather than answer phones... & get paid the same.
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