Done "Simply" Accounting / new Office 2007

Yay... a solid week of typing away to get the walkthrough for the software Simply Accounting is finished.  I took about a week to read they book and doing some research.  Maybe I was set against it as during my research I found that it was sort of a dead program. Nobody was really using it anymore.  I even went so far as to download some stuff on Quickbooks to decide if I was going to do a walkthrough for that instead.

 

So, the book we've had for this program apparently wasn't so good, so we got another, and got conflicting reports on it.  So I looked at the book and it was pretty .. well not indepth, but there definitely was a lot to the book, and nothing really coherent.  Maybe if you knew something about Accounting it would probably help.  But alot fo the excercises didn't seem to make sense.  Maybe it's my teaching but I expect a learning experience to have practical meaning.  So I set about my task of simplifying Simply Accounting.

 

So, I read through the book and picked out what was important to learn.  I took the perspective of a person who would be just entering in the information.  So I concentrated on the main transaction of business (and not the accounting stuff).

 

Took me a while, but it was pretty fun.  Just a lot of typing of minor instructions (you really have to build these walkthroughs for idiots).  But by the end, the 40 page walkthrough I think was done just right.

 

What was neat was near the end I switched from using Office 2003, to Office 2007.  I didn't think I'd like the new Office because of the BIG icons (what's called the ribbon now).  But When they said they did it to help minimize confusion by reducing the 7 different ways to do 1 thing, they meant it.  It actually was pretty streamlined.  Where a power user like me would go ahead and customize the toolbar all  the time, with the new 2007 you don't have to anymore.  No confusing menus to cycle through, or try to figure out where it is...

 

Now that I've got my hands on it, and I understand most of it, looks like I should redo my walkthroughs for Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access.  [tho' I was quite impressed with my Access walkthrough... I hope not much has changed on it]

 

There wasn't a new version of FrontPage... wonder where it went (apparently integrated with the Exchange server thingie...).

 

Anyways, my major project at PTC has been finished... I can't remember what Rain said I should do next... It was some more software stuff.  To think since I've been there in the summer, I've done the computers program twice over now, a ton of small lessons, picked out new books for the math numeracy learning and many other IT type jobs... I wonder if it's time for a raise?  heh