Friday, April 13, 2012

One down three to go

As a requirement of my new job I need to obtain a 2010 Microsoft Office Master certificate.  This requires the passing of four MS exams:
  • Excel Expert 2010
  • Word Expert 2010
  • PowerPoint 2010
  • Access 2010 or Outlook 2010 or Sharepoint 2010
I sat the Excel one yesterday - and passed!! (Go me!)

So now just have to work on the others.  I am a bit disappointed though as I really, really, really don't like Powerpoint and having to sit an exam in it is going to be challenging!

In case you're interested I found the Excel exam quite obscure.  I had studied the list of things that were going to be covered, so no real surprises there, well except question 1 - Data Consolidation - I'm sure that wasn't in the list.  But it was the way some of the questions were worded that got me.  "Create a pivot chart showing x, y and z" ... Um, okay, well how do you want x, y & z shown? Maybe it's just the way I think.

And, unlike everyone else I've spoken to who has sat the exam, I didn't run out of time, actually I had 15mins left at the end.  Which is annoying because you can't go back to previously answered questions. You can either answer them as they're presented or mark them as 'skip' and answer them at the end so trying to work out how long to spend on each question is impossible.

Not sure what to do next, whether to get the PowerPoint one out of the way or focus on one of the others which might be a bit more challenging.

3 comments:

Keads said...

I have taught MS Office classes that took 16 weeks. They are called "Intro to Computer" classes here. I gave up. They are as you say.

In fact, 2010 Office classes are referred to as "Hey, where are my buttons" classes for users of previous versions.

Good luck to you!

Julie said...

16 week courses on OFFICE eeekkk!!! That would drive anyone crazy.

And yes, I've been doing some 'roll-out' training recently (staff moving from XP & Office 2003 to Win 7 and Office 2010) and a lot of it is "where is it now" type stuff. Not sure if you know but MS have produced a series of interactive ribbon tools - it has the 2003 menu / toolbars, you click on how you used to do it, then it flips over and shows you how to do it in 2010. It's got some limitations but for most things it is really useful.

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