Hey guys, just another update of the completion of one of the things that’s been keeping me busy and away recently. This one was a 5-week digital skills masterclass organized by HOPin Academy that covered Microsoft Suite and Google workspace.
Like the MindMend Mental Health Bootcamp I posted about, this was another intensive training session. The entire learning journey was nothing but fun, exciting and educating. I sharpened my skills on many things I already knew in Microsoft Word, and learnt a lot of new things.
In Microsoft Word, I learnt knew things like borders, played around headers and footnotes, and page breaks. It took a bit of explaining to properly wrap my head around page breaks, but I’m confident now to say I understand how to insert different page breaks, and how to play around page/section numbering and orientation using page breaks. We also did a dive into tables, their design and layout in Word. I finally learnt how to create tables with merged or split cells.
I was more interested in powerpoint because most of my plans for the future will for the most part require that I have an A game in powerpoint presentations. Our tutor Emmanuel Konam totally killed it! He didn’t just teach us the basics of using powerpoint, but threw in extra tips like the powerpoint color combination psychology amd sources to download custom icons for powerpoints, among others. I’m proud to mention that it was solely based on his lessons that I designed the presentation my team (Team Calm) won the HopIn MindMend Mental Health Bootcamp Challenge with. I am obviously still at an amateur in terms of powerpoint design, but I believe I’ve built the foundation and will perfect my craft with with practice.
In Excel, almost everything I learnt was new. Until this training, I never really took the time to explore Excel myself because I didn’t use it much beside entering data. For data analysis during my final year project last year, I relied solely on SPSS. I learnt basic excel functions like SUM, PRODUCT, If, etc. I tried as much as I could to hide my excitement here, because the functions looked very similar to coding, something I’m very interested in.
After these, the next stop on our learning journey was to visit the Google-based alternatives of the already-discussed MS packs. We looked at Google Docs, Sheets and Slides. The main difference between the two being that Google’s apps automatically syncs/saves your data and progress into your drive, where as you’ll have to save it to OneDrive manually for Microsoft, especially if you’re working on Microsoft Word offline. Google had the advantage of the ability for multiple people to work on one document, sheet or slide simultaneously and leave feedback for each in the form of comments.
Even though I already know how to create and use google forms, I picked up a few extra things during this lesson like creating deadlines for forms, and extracting the data collected to Excel or Sheets.
The training ended on Friday last week, and was a job well done by Emmanuel Konam and a big thank you to HopIn Academy. These skills will go a long way to increasing success in both my professional and personal life.
The training was pulled off by a collaborative effort of Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) and HOPin Academy, and we will be awarded certificates some time this week or the next. GIZ is an organization to be reckoned with and I’m really excited about it. Onto the next…
