Free tutorials: Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, HTML, CSS, Dreamweaver

Last week In Pictures launched 12 free online computer tutorials on how to use applications such as Microsoft Office, OpenOffice.org, and Dreamweaver 8. (Last year I blogged about their free computer book PDF downloads, no longer available on their site now unfortunately.)

The key feature of these tutorials for beginners, which were developed as part of a US Department of Education study, is that they are based mainly on pictures and illustrations rather than text - which is much more helpful for lots of people. The focus is on how to do common tasks with mini-projects (the "learn by doing" via "howtos" approach), with clear simple screenshots.

The bias is more PC than Mac and some examples clearly use Internet Explorer rather than Firefox, but the principles should still be easy to grasp.

Currently available are pictorial tutorial guides on:

Microsoft Office

• Access 2003
• Excel 2003
• PowerPoint 2003
• Word 2003
• Publisher 2003

Openoffice.org

• Base 2.0
• Calc 2.0
• Impress 2.0
• Writer 2.0

Web layout

• Dreamweaver 8
• HTML & CSS

More free tutorials are scheduled for release by In Pictures later this year on Microsoft Office 2007 programs, Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Fireworks, plus Web programming tutorials for non-programmers on MySQL, PHP, and Perl.

You can join their mailing list to be notified when their new tutorials are released.

You can even suggest topics for them to produce more introductory tutorials on.

Useful stuff. If you want training on the above computer programs then you could do a lot worse than try these tutorials. I can't wait for the programming tutorials for non-programmers, myself!

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