Office skills testing

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shrub

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#298594 29-Jun-2022 23:06

Got an odd one that someone here might have a link. I'm on the hunt for a basic office skill test that I can use for targeting up skilling.
It all comes from a few staff that are leaning on myself and others to do really basic tasks(attach an file to an email).

We only use excel (templated data entry), outlook and word.

All it needs is a score and and what questions they missed so I can get the right information out to the ones that are struggling.

Not looking at spending thousands on a complicated training pack.

gzt

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#2936274 29-Jun-2022 23:12

I use these infrequently. It's surprising how some functions are less visible in recent versions. I wonder if something like a standard org toolbar config can reduce the support load.

eracode

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#2936282 30-Jun-2022 02:23

Sorry, not an answer to your query but this reminds me of an office assistant person I once inherited. We used Excel extensively in financial analysis spreadsheets. It was some time after we started working together that I realised this person was entering, say, ten five-figure amounts in a column, then taking out a calculator, adding them up then typing the total at the foot of the column.

Sometimes I just sit and think. Other times I just sit.

BlakJak

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#2940376 10-Jul-2022 16:15

gzt: I use these infrequently. It's surprising how some functions are less visible in recent versions. I wonder if something like a standard org toolbar config can reduce the support load.

I definately wouldn't encourage anything custom. They'll just take the problem elsewhere.

Better to do some support resources for commonly used functions and maybe offer some training, a little time invested for your people will go a long way.

Most of what I know in Excel has been due to necessity and being able to interpret Google results. But this needs to start somewhere and I've appreciated people who just showed me what to do a couple of times.

That and I actually took papers based on MS Office at polytech backintheday. If your organisation uses Office it's worth offering training and not assuming everyone has the same grasp on it.

No signature to see here, move along...

ANglEAUT

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#2940496 10-Jul-2022 19:33

Sorry, also don't have an answer to your specific question.

In my experience, people will only learn when they are "forced" to. In your case, if you leave & they can't lean on you any more or when you start saying "no". To ease that transition, find the relevant YouTube or MS training video on how to accomplish a task, or the relevant MS article. Ask them to try & follow the steps in the video / article to accomplish their task. Maybe even sit next to them & step through the article / video together. Next time, fire off the link first & ask if they've followed the steps. Here are some more locations where you could grab some snippets from: https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/microsoft-office-tutorials-courses/

Please keep this GZ community vibrant by contributing in a constructive & respectful manner.

everettpsycho

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#2940568 10-Jul-2022 22:13

I hate the actual testing packages, as someone who is proficient in the software and if I can't do something can usually figure it out by just poking around, I often get false negative marks on tests for not doing it the way the test believes is correct. It's only usually 1 or 2 questions in a test and it's still a good result but it annoys me that I've talked in some real stupid questions like saving a certain way for this reason.

You might not have to pay anything if you have a bit of time up your sleeve. You could fairly easily make a template up to send to people with some instructions like send an email to xyz with the attachment from a certain place, or add up some values and total all the rows. Just ask them to keep the finished work somewhere so it can be reviewed. Sure it might not be as invasive as an actual test to see what they did to get the result but you should be able to at least see if they used a sum formula or just wrote the value in manually. Could also be a real pain and store it in SharePoint so you could cycle through the historic versions and make sure only the person being tested actually saved it not someone else.