Free Digital Skills Taster Sessions with happy

In this session, you will explore how you can improve your communication skills and build your confidence by using AI tools. Whether you want to write with more clarity, speak up more in meetings, or feel more self-assured in your work, AI can be your secret weapon! AI tools such as ChatGPT and Copilot can refine your writing, sharpen your presentation skills and support your growth as a thinking partner. You will leave this session with tools you can start using straight away.

Course requirements

You need to be familiar with creating a basic Word document and PowerPoint presentation. A basic knowledge of browsing the web would be useful.

What you will learn

By the end of this session, you will:

• Understand how AI can support confidence-building at work
• Learn the key rules of using AI tools effectively and responsibly
• Discover how to use AI as a thinking partner to brainstorm and structure ideas
• Explore how AI tools can help you communicate with clarity and confidence

Protecting your Excel workbooks and worksheets can be crucial for data security. Workbook protection includes setting a password to prevent unauthorised access and to protect certain areas of a document from being changed. Worksheet protection secures an entire worksheet, or just specific cells and ranges, allowing controlled access to sensitive information.

What you will learn

In this short session, you will have an overview of workbook and worksheet protection, including:

• Setting a password to open or modify a workbook
• Protecting your workbook structure
• Protecting an entire worksheet
• Protecting specific cells and ranges

Do you want to unlock the potential of Google Sheets? This taster session will allow you dive into data importing from Excel and learn techniques for smart data cleanup.

Course requirements

You should have some basic experience of working with Google Sheets.

What you will learn

In this one-hour session, you will learn:

• Using automatic functions to remove duplicates and trim whitespace;
• Using text functions to tidy your data e.g. TRIM, TEXTJOIN, CONCATENATE, UPPER, PROPER, LOWER etc

Excel enables you to analyse vast amounts of data and create high level summaries and visuals in relation to questions that you may have. There are various features that you can use, and this session covers some of them. 

You can format the data and present it in a number of visual and user-friendly ways.

What you will learn:

In this one-hour session, you will learn:

• Creating tabs (using the mouse, using the keyboard)
• What is the difference between relative and absolute referencing?
• What is the difference between a Formula and a Function?
• What are Function Arguments?
• Creating a Basic IF Statement
• What Functions do you find most Useful?
• Creating a Recommended Pivot Table
• Creating a Pivot Chart from a Pivot Table (using the keyboard)

If you work with large amounts of data that you need to analyse using manual calculations or that you need to create Pivot Tables from then this session is for you. Learning how to tidy up data will help when it comes down to correctly retrieving and calculating the results that you need.

What you will learn

In this session, you will learn:

• Importing Data
• Removing Blank Rows
• Inserting and Deleting columns (using the keyboard)
• Finding and Removing Duplicates
• Finding and Removing Certain Formatting
• AutoFill Options (creating sequences)
• Flash Fill (Extracting First and Last Names from Full Names, Extracting Numbers from Text)
• Data formats (Numbers, Dates, Percentages)
• Converting Numbers to Percentages
• Using Autocomplete to Populate Cells

When working with OneDrive, Teams and SharePoint it is important that everyone is on the same page so that people can communicate and collaborate effectively. More often than not without specific training people get very confused about the differences between these products and when to use one over the other.

You may hear some people say that Microsoft Teams and OneDrive sit on top of SharePoint. If you struggle to understand the differences between these applications, then this session is for you.

The Benefits

Once you understand the differences, you will know which application to use in order to find the right tools to get the job done.

Session Contents:

• What is OneDrive?
• What is Microsoft Teams?
• What is SharePoint?
• When should I use OneDrive, Microsoft Teams and SharePoint?

This taster session will transform your email experience and automate your workflow by showing you how to make Outlook work smarter for you.

Course requirements

You will need to be confident using Outlook to send and receive email.

What you will learn

In this one-hour session, we will cover:

• Mastering Quick Parts for repetitive content
• Setting up Delayed Delivery for perfect timing
• Managing Multiple Signatures for different contexts
• Utilising Voting Buttons for efficient decision-making.

Data Validation is a way of checking the accuracy and clarity of the data being entered into your Excel Spreadsheets.

XLOOKUP provides a powerful, robust and flexible alternative to using the VLOOKUP, HLOOKUP and also INDEX and MATCH functions when you are looking to cross reference and retrieve data from a list.

There are different types that can be set up in Excel. The most common type is the creation of a Data Validation drop-down list which offers a pre-defined list of values that you can choose from.

What you will learn:

• What is XLOOKUP?
• Creating an XLOOKUP function to return a value from a different sheet
• What is Data Validation?
• Using Data Validation to create a dropdown list

Microsoft Teams has come a long way since its introduction in 2017. A lot of organisations have adopted hybrid working and are using Teams as a remote communication tool, such as for chat, audio and video calls, sharing content and real-time collaboration. On this session, you will learn the different ways to collaborate and communicate with your colleagues, for improved communication and productivity.

What you will learn

On this session, you will learn:

• Planning – things to think about
• What is a Team? How do you create one?
• What can Team Owners do?
• What is a Channel and what are the different types that you can create?
• How do you create a Channel?
• What is a Tab?
• What is Chat Chat?
• What is Teams Chat?
• What is a Mention?
• What are Tags?
• When would you use Chat Chat vs Teams Chat? Scenarios