2010-03-22: Bringing smiles with Microsoft Excel

Day 25

Monday, 22nd March, 2010

Making small differences with Microsoft Office

A common theme that most teams found working with different MDA's (Ministries, Department and Agencies) was lack of exposure to IT tools. Their use of computers is mostly restricted to using Microsoft Office. And even then the use of Word and Excel is very basic and most of them are unaware of simple features in these products.

Thanks to Justin, he organised an Excel training at Axari Hotel last Friday. We requested 2 of our colleagues from Investment Promotion Bureau to join the training as well. Among them, Ema, is responsible for collecting Business Premises Registration Fees here. For the past 3 weeks he has been really helpful in making us understand the process of Business Registration and also facilitated a field visit for us. However, whenever we made request for any information I saw him struggle with compiling information in either Word and Excel. Thus, I feel obligated to train him on Excel so he can do his work in a more productive manner. After his training this morning I organised a session with him to walk him through different features which can help him on his day-to-day work. I cleaned up and reorganized the spreadsheet that he uses to store his data and used as a base file for our training exercise. With every exercise the smile on his face started growing. I could clearly see the feeling of him getting more empowered with Excel. I also compiled the step-by-step process in a word document which he can refer later promising him to show him more this Thursday.

We did the same with the Business Development Team here and helped them with Microsoft Word..

Its amazing how you can bring smile on faces with Word and Excel!

Thanking students from CRUTECH

Dan and Kei had been working with Cross River University of Technology (CRUTECH) and they arranged for three really bright students to assist various teams on their CSC assignment. The students helped the teams to make the website of CRUTECH and Department of Public Transportation. Donald helped us at the Investment Promotion Bureau build a prototype of their online Business Directory and Premises Registration Fee collection. He did a fabulous job in completing the prototype in less than a week. We were really impressed with his technical skills. Since the work done by the students were voluntary we decided to thank them by hosting a dinner. I hope the opportunity to work with IBM CSC team reflects good on their resume.

Donald in white shirt sitting third on the left row.