Education...

I have been fortunate enough to get onto a funded course at the local College: ECDL Extra (European Computer Driving Licence).  It runs every week day for three hours, and will be a month long course.  I can use a computer, I can do most of the basic stuff required for every day things, and I am grateful for all the things I have learned over the years.

But here are some new things I have learned in the first week of my course;
Word 2010:

• You can place items onto the clip board and use them over and over again, this is especially useful when you have a number of different things you need to copy and paste.
• I have learned a few more keyboard short cuts and that makes what I already knew how to do using the mouse even quicker!
• Pasting text after having removed all formatting - a great thing when someone sends you a document that has been poorly formatted and you need to redo it.
• Changing line spacing (I hate it when I copy something off the internet onto a document and then the spacing between the lines is different to what ever I had been typing, now I know how to make all the line spacing the same!)
• Some important rules to follow when using find and replace, for example, if you want to replace man with woman, remember to put a space after man before clicking the find and replace button, otherwise words like 'manual' become 'womanual'
• I now know how tabs work!
• How do set a hard page break.
• I can edit and use the page headers and footers, I even learned how to put the file path in!
• I learned that if you want to add a new row onto a table at the end you don't have to right click and then go to row, add new after.  You can just click into the last section of your table and hit tab!  Much quicker!
• I have learned how to wrap text!
• I can Mail Merge!  What an incredibly useful tool!  I'm definitely using this one in the future.  You probably knew this, but you can mail merge labels too, and even tell the printer what size labels you have.
• I have learned how to customise my tool bar.

And a few more things!  And that was week one.  Next week is Power Point, which I have never used before, so everything will be new to me.  I love learning, I love knowing how to use the tools I have more effectively, I love living in a country where these opportunities are made available to me.  I feel so blessed.