//beconfused

Just yesterday (Wednesday), I gave a demonstration with 2 other friends on Microsoft Office Excel 2003.

Previously, I took part in some sort of competition to test my skills in Office Excel 2003. I passed the test and won the competition in my school.

I later discovered that I need to prepare some sort of speech to give to the a small audience to receive the prize. Well, the speech went okay. I’ll post my speech up soon, it’s a rather simple speech though, it’s my first speech and I was really nervous when on stage.

And just when I thought the whole Excel thing is over, I found out I have to give an Excel demonstration to some people at my polytechnic with two other winners of the Microsoft Office Excel 2003 certification competition.

My scope of the demonstration is:

• PivotTable
• Diagrams

I have no problems in diagrams as it is pretty easy. PivotTable is a little hard and we came together to create some raw data to better suit the demonstration. It appears that not much people responded for the PivotTable, either they found it too hard (to use or to understand) or it just basically useless for them (I am not surprised).

My other 2 friends did fine in the demonstration but they made several minor mistakes during which the demonstration is shown. They are usually typing mistakes and I was lucky that my demonstration is about dragging and dropping most of the time so obviously I don’t make typo errors.

We fail to understand the level of the audience. They are all lecturers and administrative staff. About 10 people, including my previous semester’s class tutor, is present. It turns out that our demonstration is too hard to grasp. We did not conduct surveys to question the Office Excel knowledge of the audience before hand.

Although mistakes are made, we’re relieved that we manage to finish the whole presentation (although I took too long) and the people seemed thankful for the presentation.

I learnt a lot through this:

• Speak better in front of people
• Conducting a simple course
• and I learnt more about Excel while preparing for this demonstration

The main reason I agree to give a demonstration with my 2 friends is to gain experience in conducting a simple course. That day, I understand it is not easy to capture attention of people. The lecturers struggled to capture the attention when teaching about the ways of -doing good- performing extraction of DNA from cells. I recall we were playing hangman at the back of the lecture hall.

Yesterday, the lecturers listened. They tried to, at least. They have been helpful. It’s quite an experience to teach your lecturers something. If given a chance to sit in a lecture hall again, I will pay much more attention than the previous (sleepy) semesters.

Tags: microsoft, office, school