I need computer skills! Any suggestions?

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Ok so here is the situation.


I just graduated from college with a Bachelor of Arts in History. Now I am looking at a government website for jobs. I know the job that I want to do which is a clerk. Unfortunately I am coming up short in some skills and abilities that they require from me.

I need to become more educated and proficient at using, 'General Office Automation Hardware'. That means software programs such as Microsoft Word and Excel among other things. Basically Microsoft Office I also need to become more proficient with hardware devices such as a scanner and a printer. The printer part should not be hard as I have one at home that I can finally learn how to connect.


What I am trying to do is to figure out anyway I can get this type of education and training without having to shell out hundreds or thousands of dollars for it as I have just completed a bachelors degree and am now in debt. One route I am taking is aquiring these skills the non-profit route. I am volunteering at a non-profit book store which donates money to Autism. I got a slow elementary start with that but the actual time I get with that is hit or miss. I will be looking for something with a little more consistency to it. Any suggestions would be welcome.

How did you get a BA without knowing how to use a wordprocessing program and printer?

- Printer. Every f*****g printer is different, and all of them completely illogic, so forget about 'studying' one. I can develop computer apps, and I still don't know how to use properly the one I have. I never cared, when there's some problem and some light is blinking (to be honest, have no idea what the different lights meaning are), I just take away any stuck paper, unplug it and plug it again. And it works. Printers today are just plug and print. And you can set the default printer and change properties in Control Panel > Devices and Printers

- Scanners. f*****g easy. You plug it, you select a folder and scan. The images are stored in the folder, that's all.

- Word. Big program, but you just use 5% of it. What you need to know:

* Different formats (rtf, doc, docx, pdf)
* How to use styles, that's very important
* How to create automatically a table of contents
* How to change margins, page numbers and header
* How to insert new breaks/sections
* How to use automatic spelling
* How to use tables. VERY important
* How to insert and place images.

With that, you can use Word without problems.

- Excel is big stuff. This program is amazingly powerful. But the very basics are:

* Format cells
* Use conditional formatting
* Use formulas, specially the Sum one, get used to use the content of a cell as a funcion of other ones, that can be even in a different tab.
* Create charts
* Group/ungroup columns and rows to organize the whole stuff.
* Printing. Here is a bit tricky to control exactly what you want to appear in every sheet.

How did you get a BA without knowing how to use a wordprocessing program and printer?


Actually Microsoft Word I know how to use. Often times I would just get cash on my card and pay like $0.7 a copy for a document that I needed printed up. So I guess I painted a much darket picture than I should have.

Many community colleges and community centers offer classes in Word, Excel, etc to learn the more intermediate or advanced fucntions. My city and several nearby cities, for example, offer classes for usually $10-25 that last a few weeks. Our community college offers a more in depth 3-credit 1 semester course. You could try calling your city hall and asking if they do something like this.

Download these programs from a site like bolt.cd and read the help file. Seriously, you could even just say you know them and learn on the job, they are that easy. I think employers just give those requirements just to weed out grandmas who never touched a computer in their life.

I have MS Office experience up the @$$ and cannot obtain work in paid document processing other than through Amazon Turk, which is risky because there is always the chance an employer won't pay. Because everything is confidential through the Amazon web servers, it's impossible to know whether you're dealing with the same bad apples.

But we Aspies lack no meaningful social role to the broader society, being flesh-and-blood computers without any intrinsic worth outside our small circles, so it's all good. I can't wait for the day they start sending us to concentration camps. At least that would be a refreshing change.

To learn to use Word, download a document from the internet, then reproduce by yourself in Word to learn how to format the thing.

For Excel, make a spreadsheet about something of interest to you, like how many of each brand of food item you currently have, then chart it in a bar graph.

You can also buy a book on how to use Microsoft Office and do some of the exercises in the book.

Then, you can say that you know how to use Word and Excel and learn on the job for more complicated uses, which are not much more complicated than these.

At the office, the people will tell you how to use their printer and scanner that are already set up, and you dont' need to set them up yourself.

With printers and scanners, just know how to use them efficiently, like how to load paper, how to scan, how to determine how to load paper.

For Microsoft office, get a copy, and get a book from the library. There are s**t tons of books on how to use every app in Office.

Check out MOOCs online - there are a lot of colleges offering free courses these days.

Coursera has a lot of computer classes. Also try EdEx, Udacity, Khan Academy, Open2Study...