Training options for Microsoft Office products

If you or colleagues require additional training in how to use Microsoft Office, there are lots of options to choose from. And they’re all either free or discounted for not-for-profit organisations.

Self-paced learning programs

A helpful starting point is the Microsoft Digital Skills Centre, a suite of learning programs provided for minimal or zero cost and hosted by Connecting Up and TechSoup.

There’s a wide variety of instructional content, from basic MS Office-related tasks to more complex projects like app-building or covid-readiness. Any that are not free are heavily discounted for not-for-profits. Courses in this category include:

• Word: Word 101, Learn the Basics; Word 102, Editing Tools; Word 103 - Creating Tables and Lists;  Word 104 - Using references
• Excel: Excel 101 - Learn the Basics; Excel 102 -Editing and Formatting Text; Excel 103 - Designing Your Worksheets; Excel 104 - Using Formulas and Functions; Excel 105 - Using Functions to Format Text; Excel 106 - Adding, Formatting, and Analysing Charts
• PowerPoint: PowerPoint 101 - Learn the Basics; PowerPoint 102 - Formatting Text and Images; PowerPoint 103 - Designing Professional Presentations
• Office 365 tools: OneDrive 101: Storing smartly; Teams 101 - Getting Started; Teams - 201 - Advanced Functions.

MS support help & training

Microsoft publishes detailed instructional content to help users learn more about the products their Office product suite. Each product has its own learning portal, in which you can drill down to find the function you want to learn in both video and user-friendly text:

• Word
• Excel
• Powerpoint
• Sharepoint
• Outlook
• Yammer

Alternatively, you can download PDF cheat sheets for each of the above products.

Both the self-paced learning programs and the MS support help & training cover the following topics:

• Outlook training topics: Quick start, Setup & customise, Create & send mail, Manage email, Organise your inbox, Contacts & tasks, Calendar, Outlook for iOS & Android
• Word training topics: Quick start, Write & edit, Format text, Lay out pages, Insert tables, pictures & watermarks, Save & print, Share & co-author, Use Word for school
• Excel training topics: Quick start, Rows, columns & cells, Formulas & functions, Formatting, Tables & charts, Pivot tables, Linked data types
• Powerpoint training topics: Quick start, Slides & layouts, Text & tables, Pictures & graphics, Present slideshows, Animation, video & audio, Share & co-author
• Teams training topics: What is MS Teams, Chat & share files, Activity feed & search, Get your team up & running, Go-to guide for team owners, Organise your teams list, Teams & channels.

Microsoft Creators

The Microsoft Creators community of users have also developed an amazing wide variety of YouTube video content to help you learn more about MS Office products. You’ll find it on the Microsoft 365 YouTube channel.

Read next

MS Teams training for not-for-profits