Comments on: A class in L.A. to help my mom stop worrying and learn to love Excel and Word?

Question: A class in L.A. to help my mom stop worrying and learn to love Excel and Word?

tyrantkitty — Fri, 22 May 2009 15:04:33 -0800

Please recommend beginning MS Excel and Word classes (offline) in Los Angeles for a computer-antagonistic but somewhat -knowledgeable almost-senior.

After about forty years in publishing, my 61-year-old mother is out of a job. While she managed to make it through all forty years without learning any Microsoft programs, she reluctantly agrees that it's a good idea to learn the basics of these programs so she can beef up her resume for the job hunt.

Due to personality conflicts, assume it will not work for me to teach my mother. Though she is not dumb, she tends to get frustrated with new technology/software. Despite this, not only is her Google-fu strong, she's familiar and comfortable with multiple publishing programs (including PageMill, Quark and Publisher), all of which she's learned on-the-job. So she's not computer-illiterate. I think it's just hard for her to immediately see how one set of software skills can translate to another program. For whatever reason, it's just not intuitive for her, but once she gets the hang of a particular program, she's off to the races.

The main goal is to get her familiar and comfortable with the way Excel looks and acts on a very basic level. So I'm looking for recommendations for Los Angeles-area courses or instructors that would teach her the basics of document editing in Word and the basics of data entry in Excel (while it's probably always included, I don't think graphs or charts will ever come into play for her in a job), with patience but without condescension. Please do not suggest online classes; she and I (and an uninvolved third party I consulted before posting this question) agree that way madness lies. Physical classroom only. I would like to mimic a workplace setting (where she's done all past successful computer learning) as much as possible.

Other preferences (but not necessities): close to the Miracle Mile area, course duration of just a few days and 2-3 hours per day, the less expensive the better.

By: Linnee

Linnee — Fri, 22 May 2009 22:18:56 -0800

You can find classed at an adult school in LA Unified School District.

By: Linnee

Linnee — Fri, 22 May 2009 22:20:03 -0800

Here's the link:
http://adultinstruction.org/

By: librarylis

librarylis — Sat, 23 May 2009 01:18:58 -0800

The Los Angeles Public Library offers this for free, typically, (here's the info for the Fairfax branch), but the thing is, with the budget I'm not sure if the closest branch to her will be offering Word/Office classes. Your best is to call them, or have her call them--they will definitely know.

Santa Monica Public Library--not as close--also offers computer classes, and they definitely offer Word and Excel classes. The problem with SMPL is that the classes tend to fill up fast.

If you're not running into any luck with the libraries, of course there's the community colleges. The Los Angeles Community Colleges have a series of classes called Computer Applications Office Technology that cover Word and the rest of the Office suite. They're a bit longer than you want (about a month, some of them two weeks), but they are enrolling now for the summer.