Microsoft Office

Become a Microsoft Office 365 Champion!

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Microsoft_Champion

Would you like to become an expert in Microsoft Office 365? Would you like to be able to use the software effortlessly, and also provide valuable support to your coworkers who may occasionally need technical assistance? Well, if you’re a Hopkins employee, then now is your chance! You are officially invited to join the Microsoft Office 365 Champions Academy.

The Microsoft Office 365 Champions Academy offers in-depth training to individuals who want to learn how to use Microsoft tools, become part of a community of champions, and provide support to their colleagues. All that’s required is to attend two, online, half-day Champions Academy sessions. The sessions will be led by a Microsoft training specialist and will focus on the following Office 365 topics:

  • Teams
  • Forms
  • OneNote/Class Notebook
  • OneDrive
  • Stream
  • Accessibility
  • MIE Training

As a champion, you will also have access to a Microsoft trainer upon completion of the sessions if you have any follow-up questions or require additional support.

The expectations for champions are as follows:

  • Attend two half-day, instructor-led Champions Academy sessions.
  • Attend an optional additional half-day session on how to teach others.
  • Serve as an advocate to generate enthusiasm and excitement for Office 365 products.
  • Lead, reinforce, and validate optimal application use and best practices.
  • Provide support to your colleagues.
  • Assist the Learning Solutions team with identifying and resolving training gaps that may arise.

The two sessions will take place from 9:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. on March 2, 2021 and March 3, 2021.

So what are you waiting for? Sign up for the Champions Academy HERE and become a Microsoft Office 365 champion!

You Can Run, but You Can’t…

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Interconnected

I have to admit this. Some people are good at keeping meticulous records, but I am not one of them. My colleagues laugh at me because I am always losing notes, notepads, and even the pens I use to write my notes. Knowing this, I do use technology to help me. For some bizarre reason that I can’t really explain, I keep my digital life in much better order than my physical one. Perhaps it’s because you can throw a pile of virtual papers into a digital stack and rely on your technology to sort things out.

If you want me to dig out an address of someone I haven’t seen for ten years, I usually have all the contact details because I faithfully record any contact every time I make one. Here are some of the things I do:

  1. Every time I receive an email, I record the person’s email address using Outlook. (I right-click on the person’s name in the email and add it to my Outlook contacts.)
  2. Every time I make or receive a phone call, I make sure the contact information is preserved with the name.
  3. Whenever I get an email announcing a change of address, I record it in my contacts database.
  4. I make sure that my Outlook database on the computer is synchronized with my records on my iPad and my cell phone.
  5. I periodically review these databases, getting rid of contacts (usually on a long plane ride) that I am certain I will never see or hear from again.

That is how I make sure I don’t waste any time looking for someone’s contact information. It’s usually at the tip of my fingers. The maintenance of this information takes no time at all, and it is very handy to be able to reach the right people when you need them.

Outlook is an incredibly powerful tool, and it can do so much more than simply send and receive emails. Maintenance of a good contacts database is an excellent, painless way of making your professional and personal life easier to manage.

 

Can You Count?

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Counting3

Many of us work with spreadsheets all day long, but we sometimes overlook the power or the formula. As a result, we wind up wasting time doing things manually when our computers are far better equipped to perform these tasks than we are.

Here is a simple tip that allows you to count cells in an Excel spreadsheet. Let’s suppose you have a list of students. Some of them have passed and others have failed, and you have a spreadsheet that looks something like this:

STUDENT RESULT
Alberto PASS
Angela PASS
Anne-Marie PASS
Ben PASS
Carlos PASS
Dale PASS
Edmund FAIL
Fermin PASS
Hussein PASS
Ibrahim FAIL
Joe FAIL
John PASS
Kathie FAIL
Lakeisha FAIL
Linnea PASS
Mach PASS
Mary FAIL
Peter PASS
Rosemary FAIL
Wendy PASS
TOTAL 20
PASS 13
FAIL 7

 

So, how did we total the numbers in the bottom three cells?

  1. The first is the total number of students in the class. We can create a formula that looks at all the cells (A2 to A21) in the first column except the top one (A1) and counts any cell that is not blank. We do it by putting the following formula in the cell, B21, where the total (20) is reported:
    =COUNTA(A2:A21)
  2. The second is the number of students who have passed. So we have to count all the cells except the top one (B1) if they contain the word “PASS.” Otherwise, we don’t count them. This conditional counting is accomplished with this formula:
    =COUNTIF(B2:B21, “PASS”)
  3. Finally, we want to count the number of students who have failed. The formula is almost the same as the way we created the formula for the people who passed:
    =COUNTIF(B2:B21, “FAIL”)

Using formulas can save you a lot of time, and the machine can do it much more accurately than you can. Follow the principle that you should never buy a dog and bark yourself!

You can become very sophisticated with the way you use formulas in Excel, and the university offers classes as part of your benefits package. You can take instructor-led courses or choose courses in Microsoft Office by going to our website: http://learning.jhu.edu.

Just remember that there are many versions of Excel. Make sure that you take the course that matches the computer you use and the version that’s installed on your machine.