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.
Right? I used to help people with their computers all the time. Then one day it occurred to me that I never really knew the answers either, I was just googling everything and following instructions. That’s something they could do themselves, but chose not to. So I started feeling like they were taking advantage of my time and started saying no. Then they all acted like I was their only hope. Eventually I just started pretending that I don’t know anything about computers, saying that they’ve changed too much since last time I was interested in them. I figured that’s no different than them pretending they can’t resolve their own computer problems.
The for dummies books are good if they don’t want to learn online
She’ll have to get a computer and use it in her free time instead of a phone. It’s the best way
This is one of my favorite resources for this exact type of scenario: https://edu.gcfglobal.org/en/
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.
Search engines really have become terrible. Plus so much of the internet is absolute trash now. I built a career from nothing but desire, Google, and Stack Overflow. Idk if someone could still do the same. A lot of the resources that I used for free are subscriptions now, and Google refuses to show relevant results for any searches not related to products. If Google’s search results pages are to be believed, then there are only 3-4 pages related to any given search, out of billions of websites across the globe. We have more information available on the internet than at any previous point in human history, yet much of it is completely inaccessible because search engines refuse to produce accurate results now. What is incredibly frustrating is that they were already an unimaginably wealthy company when they were still producing amazing results. But I guess more wealth than a company could spend in a thousand years isn’t enough? It wasn’t enough to have that kind of power? No. They went and completely enshitified their services, despite incredible success with their previous approach. What a fucking shame.
I saw a comment about kagi.com two days ago in a thread complaining about duckduckgo and decided to try it out. The search results are spot on every time so far, so I might keep using it and get a paid account.
Yes Kagi is definitely the best search engine today. I’ve been using the $10 tier engine for a few months now. It has definitely been a good decision.
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.
Check with your local library. Most have free beginner computer classes.
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.
Ill add GCompris to your list, not knowing what basic skills are lacking. Also for others who want to start em young and avoid this issue.
