As Pavlov said, "Does the term 'no-brainer' ring a bell?"I'm comfortable with my proficiency. Here are some of the many available sites providing tutorials for these products:
Addendum - I haven't bought a copy of Microsoft Office since about 1999 or so, when I picked up a gray market CD of Office 97 on eBay for $20. I've re-installed it on my latest computer, so that I can double-check the assignment files I've written in OpenOffice before turning them in.
As for the use of PowerPoint, well, let's just say that my opinion of the tool is entirely consistent with Edward Tufte's. As Tufte said in an essay that appeared in a 2003 issue of Wired magazine:
"The standard PowerPoint presentation elevates format over content, betraying an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch...PowerPoint's pushy style seeks to set up a speaker's dominance over the audience. The speaker, after all, is making power points with bullets to followers. Could any metaphor be worse? Voicemail menu systems? Billboards? Television? Stalin?"
For anybody who might be interested - here's Edward Tufte's own site.
I seriously recommend him and his work to anyone who's planning to teach, or who otherwise might need to provide others with information through a report or presentation.
I stumbled across Tufte while doing an online search for information that was critical of PowerPoint. He conducts workshops in major cities throughout the country, and I attended one last year when he came to Boston. It literally changed my professional life.
I also recommend this article by Ian Parker, which appeared in a 2001 issue of the New Yorker magazine.
"The usual metaphor for everyday software is the tool, but that doesn’t seem to be right here. PowerPoint is more like a suit of clothes, or a car, or plastic surgery. You take it out with you. You are judged by it—you insist on being judged by it. It is by definition a social instrument, turning middle managers into bullet-point dandies.Less PowerPoint! More teaching and learning!
But PowerPoint also has a private, interior influence. It edits ideas. It is, almost surreptitiously, a business manual as well as a business suit, with an opinion—an oddly pedantic, prescriptive opinion—about the way we should think. It helps you make a case, but it also makes its own case: about how to organize information, how much information to organize, how to look at the world."
