Computer Literacy

Practical everyday computer skills for work, study and admin, taught without assuming prior knowledge.

What this course covers

Practical everyday computer skills for work, study and admin, taught without jargon and without anyone being made to feel foolish.

This is for people who can use a computer but do not feel in control of one. Who get things done, but slowly, and with a nagging sense that there is an easier way. There usually is, and nobody ever showed them.

What you will learn

• Files and folders: where things actually go, and how to find them again
• Email that works for you: organising, searching, attachments, avoiding disasters
• Documents and spreadsheets, to a genuinely useful standard
• Working with PDFs, scans and photographs
• Printing, scanning and sharing without a fight
• Browsers, tabs, downloads and bookmarks
• Passwords, and a way of managing them that is not a notebook
• Backing up what you cannot afford to lose

Who this is for

• Adults who taught themselves and know there are gaps
• Staff whose role has become more computer-based than it used to be
• Anyone returning to work after time away
• Students who need to produce and submit documents properly
• People who avoid certain tasks because they are afraid of getting it wrong

Taught without embarrassment

The reason most adult computer training fails is not the material. It is that people will not ask a question in front of colleagues.

So sessions are run on the assumption that everyone has gaps, because everyone does, and the person who asks first is usually doing the room a favour. There is no jargon to decode, nobody is asked to demonstrate anything in front of others, and no question is treated as too basic.

Where the file actually is

The single most common source of frustration is not knowing where things are kept.

Downloaded a document and cannot find it. Saved something and it is not where you expected. Three versions of the same file and no idea which is current. None of this is a personal failing; it is a genuinely confusing design that has caught out millions of people.

Once the structure makes sense, an enormous amount of daily friction disappears. This is the part where people most often say they wish someone had explained it years ago.

Avoiding the expensive mistakes

A small amount of knowledge prevents most of the disasters: not being able to open something because it was saved in an odd place, losing work that was never backed up, sending an email to the wrong person, or clicking a link that should not have been clicked.

We cover these directly, including what to do afterwards when one has already happened, since the useful thing is usually to act quickly rather than to hope.

Where it leads

Doing your work without dreading the computer part of it, which sounds modest and changes a great deal about a working day.