The Psychology of Excel & PowerPoint

This  course introduces you to some new and interesting ways to communicate your ideas.  A lot of the work PMs do involve getting things done or moving things along a path to some goal. And the common tools to help get the job done is this duo of Microsoft Office products: Excel & PowerPoint. In most office environments it's provided as the standard Microsoft Office suite of applications when people get their computers.  These software tools have had spectacularly good outputs and spectacularly bad outputs. Unfortunately, most of the time (if not all of the time) the “bad” instances of the Excel or PowerPoint were not due to the tool, it was due to the use or the user.

This course is going to focus more on what to think about when using these tools rather than how to use some specific part of the tools, even though later it will cover steps on how to use the features of Excel and PowerPoint through a beginning to end example.  This is also not an in depth presentation of what features can do this or that; that will be left up to the hundreds of books and online resources that cover this. It's meant to give some key ideas and show how the features in each of the applications can perform so you can learn how to use some of the concepts presented in a short amount of time.

The first part of this will cover the “psychology” before you’d start up Excel or PowerPoint, and the second part covers how to do it with an example.