Short course
Complete office skills
Office software skills are the most demanded and least mastered competence on the job market. Almost every administrative job requires them, almost every candidate claims to have them, and very few really know how to structure a sixty-page document, build a tracking table that updates itself or prepare a presentation that holds up in front of management.
- Duration
- 6 weeks, 18 sessions, 60 hours
- Format
- In person or online
- Credential
- Certificate of attendance
Tuition120,000 XOF
01
By the end of the programme, you will be able to
- Master your working environment: files, folders, search, backup, shortcuts
- Produce a long professional Word document, structured, numbered and with an automatic table of contents
- Use styles, sections, headers and automatic cross-references without manual formatting
- Carry out a complete mail merge from a data file
- Build clean Excel tables, with formulas and absolute and named references
- Use the essential calculation, lookup, text, date and conditional functions
- Structure a database, sort it, filter it and extract summaries
- Build pivot tables and charts suited to the message
- Make a workbook reliable with data validation, conditional formatting and protection
- Design a clear, consistent and convincing PowerPoint presentation, and deliver it orally
- Manage your email, calendar, contacts and tasks professionally in Outlook
- Work online, share, co-edit and find your documents from any device
- Apply digital security reflexes: passwords, phishing, backup
- Independently produce a complete and consistent professional file
02
Who it is for
Target audience
The course is for all administrative and operational profiles who work on a computer every day: secretaries, executive assistants, administrative officers, accountants, field staff, project officers, teachers, health staff, traders, job seekers preparing an application, as well as final-year students.
Prerequisites
Only two requirements:
- Be able to switch on a computer, use the keyboard and mouse, and browse the internet at a basic level
- Have a laptop for the sessions; computers in the training room can be made available on request
No diploma is required. A fifteen-minute placement test is taken before the first session: it does not determine enrolment, but helps form balanced pairs and adjust the pace of the first three weeks to the cohort's real level.
03
Detailed program
18 sessions · 60 h of teaching
Week 1 — The working environment and Word basics
3 sessions · 10 h- Understanding your computer: system, memory, storage, peripherals
- The desktop, taskbar, windows and switching quickly between applications
- Organising your files: folder structure, naming conventions, versions
- File extensions and the formats to know
- Finding a lost file with the system search
- Copying, moving, compressing, extracting and transferring by USB drive
- The keyboard shortcuts that save the most time
- The browser: tabs, bookmarks, downloads, efficient searching
- Backup: local disk, USB drive, cloud, and the three-copy rule
- Exercise: completely reorganise a messy folder structure
- The Word interface, the ribbon, tabs and the customised toolbar
- Typing rules: spaces, punctuation, accented capitals, special characters
- Character and paragraph formatting
- Indents, alignment, line spacing and paragraph spacing, and giving up unnecessary line breaks
- Tabs and dot leaders
- Bulleted lists and multi-level numbered lists
- Borders, shading and text boxes
- Page layout: margins, orientation, paper size, print preview
- The spelling and grammar checker, and its limits in French
- Exercise: format an official letter and an internal memo to standard
- Styles, the key to any long document, and the end of repetitive formatting
- Modifying a style and creating your own reusable styles
- Heading hierarchy and the navigation pane
- The automatic table of contents, updating it and formatting it
- Automatic multi-level heading numbering
- Page breaks, section breaks and page numbering that restarts
- Different headers and footers by section
- Footnotes, captions and the table of figures
- Automatic cross-references and bookmarks
- Track changes, comments and comparing two versions
- Exporting to PDF and protecting a document
- Exercise: fully structure a forty-page report, with automatic table of contents and numbering
Week 2 — Advanced Word and first steps in Excel
3 sessions · 10 h- Creating and formatting a table, merging and splitting cells, repeating the header row
- Simple calculations in a Word table and linked pasting from Excel
- Inserting and positioning images, shapes and charts
- Document templates and an organisation's style guide
- Building blocks and AutoText
- Mail merge: data source, merge fields, preview, merging into documents or emails
- Conditions in a mail merge and special cases
- Generating attestations, notices and labels in bulk
- Fillable forms and protected fields
- Exercise: produce fifty named attestations by mail merge from an Excel file
- The Excel interface: workbook, sheet, cell, range, cell name
- Moving around and selecting quickly in a large table
- Data types and why a badly entered date cannot be calculated
- Fast entry, the fill handle and automatic series
- Number formats: currency, percentage, date, custom
- Formatting a readable table, and the presentation mistakes that block calculations
- Rows, columns, frozen panes and print areas
- Managing several sheets and several workbooks
- Printing a wide table on a readable page
- Exercise: build a clean, formatted and printable tracking table from scratch
- The principle of a formula and the order of operations
- Relative, absolute and mixed references, a decisive concept for what follows
- Naming a cell or range and making your formulas readable
- Basic functions: sum, average, minimum, maximum, count, round
- Conditional count and sum functions
- The IF function and nested conditions
- Logical operators and multiple conditions
- Handling formula errors and diagnosing them
- Percentages, variances, completion rates and monitoring indicators
- Auditing a formula: step-by-step evaluation, precedents, dependents
- Exercise: build a fully calculated budget tracking table with no redundant data entry
Week 3 — Using and analysing data with Excel
3 sessions · 10 h- The rules of a usable database: one row per record, one field per column
- The most common structural mistakes and the time they cost
- Converting a range into a structured table and using named columns
- Simple sorting and multi-level sorting
- AutoFilters and custom filters
- Advanced filters and extracting to another sheet
- Removing duplicates and spotting inconsistencies
- Subtotals and outline mode
- Importing a text file or data collection export without breaking the data
- Exercise: clean up and structure a real, badly built database
- Lookup functions: VLOOKUP, modern XLOOKUP, INDEX and MATCH
- Handling values not found and making a lookup robust
- Matching two files on a common identifier
- Text functions: concatenation, extraction, length, substitution, trimming spaces
- Cleaning badly typed names, phone numbers and codes
- Date functions: calculating length of service, due dates, working days, age
- Combining functions and reading a complex formula
- Rank and ranking functions
- Exercise: reconcile two lists of beneficiaries and produce the list of discrepancies
- The principle of the pivot table and the time it saves
- Building a first pivot: rows, columns, values, filters
- Changing the summary function and showing percentages of the total
- Grouping dates by month, quarter and year, and grouping into bands
- Calculated fields and calculated items
- Slicers and timelines for an interactive dashboard
- Refreshing a pivot after the source data changes
- Choosing the right chart for the message: bar, line, pie, scatter, combined
- Formatting a readable chart and stripping out the superfluous
- Pivot charts and in-cell sparklines
- Readability rules and misleading charts to avoid
- Exercise: produce five summaries and their charts from a thousand-row database
Week 4 — Making a workbook reliable and designing a presentation
3 sessions · 10 h- Conditional formatting: simple rules, data bars, colour scales, icon sets
- Formula-based rules and highlighting an entire row
- Data validation: drop-down lists, limits, dates, error messages
- Dependent drop-down lists
- Protecting a sheet and a workbook, and allowing entry only in certain cells
- Hiding formulas and locking the structure
- Sharing a workbook and tracking changes
- Designing an input form a colleague can use without risk of error
- Exercise: turn a free-form table into a protected, guided data collection tool
- What sets a presentation apart from a document: a slideshow is not a projected report
- Building the message before the slides
- Layouts, the slide master and visual consistency
- The theme, colour palette and fonts, and your organisation's style guide
- The density rule: what to remove from an overloaded slide
- Images, icons, shapes and process diagrams
- Inserting a table and a chart linked to Excel
- Reusable slide templates and numbering
- Exercise: rebuild an overloaded presentation into a readable and convincing version
- Useful transitions and animations, and those that undermine credibility
- Revealing content progressively to support what you say
- Links, action buttons and non-linear navigation
- Inserting a video, a sound and a recorded narration
- Presenter view, notes and managing a dual screen
- Exporting to PDF, video and a self-running slideshow
- Preparing a ten-minute talk: hook, common thread, conclusion, request
- Managing stage fright, pace, eye contact and difficult questions
- Adapting the same presentation to three different audiences
- Exercise: present orally to the group, with collective feedback and an assessment grid
Week 5 — Email, organisation and online work
3 sessions · 10 h- Setting up an account and understanding the difference between email protocols
- The interface, folders and managing email volume
- Writing a professional email: subject, greeting, structure, attachments, signature
- Cc and Bcc recipients, and the rules of good practice
- Automatic sorting rules, filing folders and categories
- Search, search folders and archiving
- Reply templates and out-of-office auto-replies
- Read receipts, reminders and following up important emails
- Recognising a fraudulent email and what never to click
- Exercise: clean up and organise an overloaded inbox, with sorting rules
- Creating and managing appointments, events and recurring series
- Organising a meeting: invitations, rooms, responses, rescheduling
- Sharing your calendar and checking colleagues' availability
- Multiple calendars and time zones
- Managing your contacts and distribution lists
- Tasks, deadlines and tracking progress
- Notes and the case tracking log
- Linking Outlook to your phone and syncing email, calendar and contacts
- Exercise: plan a complete working week with meetings, tasks and reminders
- Online storage: OneDrive, Google Drive, principles and trade-offs
- Syncing a folder and working offline
- Sharing a file or folder with the right permissions, and revoking access
- Simultaneous co-editing of a document and version management
- The online versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint, and their limits
- Online forms and collecting responses in a spreadsheet
- Remote meetings: joining, facilitating, sharing your screen, recording
- Passwords: length, password managers, two-factor authentication
- Phishing, booby-trapped attachments and ransomware
- Regular backup and what to do in the event of an incident
- Exercise: set up a team's shared workspace, with permissions and backup
Week 6 — The professional file
3 sessions · 10 h- Choosing the topic: a file from the participant's own work or one of four cases provided
- The three expected deliverables: a structured report, a dashboard, a presentation
- Defining the report outline and creating the corresponding Word template
- Listing the data to process and preparing the workbook
- Defining the expected indicators and summaries
- The assessment grid, shared and explained
- Exercise: produce the complete framework of the three deliverables
- Writing and structuring the report with styles, automatic table of contents and numbering
- Building the workbook: cleaned database, formulas, pivots, charts
- Making the workbook reliable with validation and protection
- Building the presentation and preparing the oral
- Linking the three deliverables and ensuring visual consistency
- The trainer works individually with each participant
- Practical test at the computer: fifteen timed tasks in Word, Excel and PowerPoint
- Ten-minute oral presentation of the professional file
- Group correction of the cohort's most common difficulties
- The shortcuts and habits to keep after the course
- Building a skills file and highlighting it on a CV
- Possible next steps: advanced Excel, Power BI, AI and automation, Google Workspace
- Presentation of attestations
04
Assessment and certification
The complete office skills training attestation is issued to participants who have attended at least 80 per cent of the sessions, passed the practical test and presented their professional file during the eighteenth session. It states the title, the 60-hour duration, the dates, the modules followed and the result of the practical assessment, and carries a unique number with a verification code.
Participants also receive:
- The complete course material in PDF, software by software
- All exercise files and their commented solutions
- Ready-to-use Word templates: report, internal memo, letter, minutes, attestation
- Model Excel workbooks: budget tracking, activity tracking, dashboard, data collection base
- PowerPoint presentation templates that follow a style guide
- Quick references for keyboard shortcuts and essential Excel functions
- A proofreading checklist before distributing a document
05
Upcoming sessions
Next dates being prepared
Leave your email: we will let you know as soon as registration opens.
06
Frequently asked questions
120,000 XOF per participant. Training for a team or an organisation is quoted on request.
6 weeks, 18 sessions, 60 hours.
Yes: you can attend onsite or online, as you prefer.
Only two requirements: be able to switch on a computer, use the keyboard and mouse, and browse the internet at a basic level ; have a laptop for the sessions; computers in the training room can be made available on request ; no diploma is required. A fifteen-minute placement test is taken before the first session: it does not determine enrolment, but helps form balanced pairs and adjust the pace of the first three weeks to the cohort's real level.
A certificate of attendance is issued at the end of the course.
Fill in the online enrolment request: no payment is taken on the site. The firm reviews your application, then contacts you to confirm your place and the payment terms. No session is scheduled yet: leave your email on this page to be told when registration opens.
Join the next cohort
Cohorts are deliberately small to guarantee genuine individual support. Reserve your place or ask us your questions.