Pre interview Assessment on Microsoft Office - HELP!

snowqueen555

Hi all

I thought it might be best to post this here as its a bit technical. I have a pre interview next week and all it says in the email is that it will assess my ability in using microsoft office, especially Word and Excel.

What kinds of things will I have to learn? This will be an office job for a local council.

Also, I don't know if I will be using Office 2003, 2000 or 2007, from what I gather the 2007 version is vastly different?

I only know the basics, I haven't touched excel since school, I have found a load of tutorial websites, will this be enough help to learn most functions on word and spreadsheets?

Thanks

Marty_J

I wouldn't imagine it's too involved. They probably want to see that you can type a letter, format it, print, save and open documents, input data into Excel, etc.

trcooke

For a job in the council I would guess that you'd be required to use Word to type up letters and such so knowledge of how to open, close, save docs as well as fundamental formatting techniques such as indentation, inserting page breaks, and text formatting such as bold, italic, size, font style etc etc. At a push they may ask about mail merging.

On the Excel side I'd expect some data manipulation questions. Sorting, creating various charts, and generally making sense of large amounts of data. Also they may ask about creating a chart of some type of some data and then presenting it in a Word or Powerpoint document.

With regards to what version they will be expecting you to use I would not consider it inappropriate to contact them before the interview to ask.

Lastly, everbody uses e-mail so make sure you know how to attach a document to an e-mail.

Hope that helps

asininity

Some basic formulas might not go amiss like SUM etc, saves time. Theres many online guides to M$ word and excel, just do a little research.

macman

If the briefing they give you is as vague as 'ability in using MS Office', then I agree with Marty J that it's unlikely that they'll expect anything more than the absolute basics. There are dozens of functions in Office that are probably only ever used by 5% of it's users.
You're right, the 07 interface is very different to 03. so you should try to familiarise yourself with that if it what they use-ring them and ask. But I doubt it, as most LA's run outdated software-my wife's authority only went onto XP a couple of year's ago.
The fact that you know which edn is which will probably put you ahead of most of the candidates. Good luck with the interview.

snowqueen555

Hi

It is a council trainee position (3 of them) which is charity funded. I think the competition wlil be very fierce as its a 3 year position, I have no idea what indentation, mail merge, page breaks and all this is, but I will try to revise them.

Excel, yikes

I did phone up earlier today but the HR is outsourced so they didn't have any information about the assessment.

NickMidgley

snowqueen555 wrote: »

Hi

It is a council trainee position (3 of them) which is charity funded. I think the competition wlil be very fierce as its a 3 year position, I have no idea what indentation, mail merge, page breaks and all this is, but I will try to revise them.

Excel, yikes

I did phone up earlier today but the HR is outsourced so they didn't have any information about the assessment.

It would definitely be a good idea to find out what version of Office they're running. Office 2007 has more or less the same functions as earlier versions, it's just a question of knowing what to press to get to them!

I took a MS Office test for a temp agency a few years ago and it did cover stuff like running a mail merge, so it might be worth swotting up to around that level.

Having said that, if it's a trainee position, how demanding are they going to be?

macman

If you can speak to a manager in the department you are applying for, then they should be able to tell you what versions they are running. And you'd get brownie points for initiative.
But don't be too surprised if they don't know either...in a lot of large organisations where people have IT support to fall back on, they can be remarkably vague about the applications they use on a daily basis.

snowqueen555

Thanks for the heads up

As I said, there is only the recruiment number and they have no information. I suppose I could try sending an email but that would be a stab in the dark!

I'll tell you all how it goes!

Marty_J

Break a leg!

snowqueen555

Ok so I got an email back, they said 2003. Problem is that yesterday I installed Office 2007 to preparation to learn to use it, so how do I return to the older version? It seems like when I installed 2007 it erased the 2003?