Lots of people have been asking me when I'm going to be releasing MICROSOFT OFFICE 2007 courses. I have a few other courses I need to finish up for older classes like Photoshop 203, PowerPoint 102, and ASP 102. These have been on PRE-RELEASE forever now and I really need to get them finished and available for customers who have purchased them.
Next, I have a bunch of handbooks that I need to finish writing too. I used to subcontract this out to a woman in California that did an AWESOME job for me, but we've lost touch. So if anyone out there knows someone who might be interested, let me know. The job basically involves watching my videos, typing in what I say, and copying a screen-shot from the video when something needs to be seen by the reader. That's it. It's not hard, just time-consuming. Then I get the handbook, read through it, add witty comments here and there, and voila... your handbook. They take me a LONG time to write because I find that when I'm doing them myself, I tend to add WAY too many comments - things I didn't think of when recording the class. If someone else writes them for me, they actually get done FASTER.
Anyhow... when I've finished all of the above, I'm going to start rolling out MICROSOFT OFFICE 2007 courses. I'm going to start with ACCESS, and then move on to EXCEL, then WORD. Sorry, I have to go in order of popularity, and ACCESS is my specialty, so that's going first.
Now, what I'm going to do is FIRST make a "What Has Changed" course which will bring everyone up to speed on the new features in Access 2007. This will probably be a SEMINAR unrelated to the 599CD titles (that is, it won't have a 101, 102, 103-type designation). I will essentially start with Access 101 and go through building my customer management database from the beginning, but only covering the features that have changed... so if you've already taken a bunch of my classes, and you want to see what's new in Access 2007, then this will be the class for you. I'll probably do one for each major level of my Access classes: 100-, 200-, and 300-level.
Then I'll do the same thing with Excel and Word. Following that, PowerPoint and Outlook. Now I don't have a lot of PP and Outlook classes now, so that shouldn't take long.
Now comes the BIG QUESTION... do I make updated classes for Photoshop? I'm still using Photoshop 7 for my classes. I know a lot of new features have been added to Photoshop since then, although the core functionality is still pretty much the same (software developers LOVE updates). So I'll have to poll my Photoshop customers to see what's up with them.
Then of course, there's WEB DESIGN. Microsoft has discontinued FrontPage and is now pushing their new program: Expression Web. So, again, I'll have to poll all of my FrontPage students to see what they want to do. Personally, I still use FrontPage 2003 and I love it. It's going to be hard for me to upgrade.
I really, really, really want to make a whole batch of web-design classes though. I want to make 3 or 4 more HTML and CSS classes, a whole bunch of ASP classes, and even get into Javascript and Ajax. These are all technologies I use every day for my personal web sites and I've been dying to make some courses for them. Problem is: there isn't anywhere near as much demand for this as Access and Excel (so that's where my time gets spent).
I've gotten a handful of requests from people who want new QuickBooks classes. The one I have up there is pretty old (2002, I think). So it's in desperate need of an upgrade.
Now this brings me to making NEW CLASSES for Office 2007. Obviously, I'm going to need to update the entire line of classes I have for Office to be used with Office 2007. Someone who is learning Word, Access, or Excel, for example, isn't going to want to watch the old video and then learn what's new. I will need to revise all of them. Fortunately it won't take anywhere near as long to prepare these as it did to make them in the first place. Preparing the classes actually takes me LONGER than recording them... I have to scour through my library of books and the web for material, then put it all down in an outline, and then practice it all, and THEN record the class. Updating the videos should be as easy as watching my previous video and redo-ing the class with the new software. So hopefully I'll be able to crank these out fast.
And of course, everyone who purchases any of my EXISTING Microsoft Office courses (101, 102, 103, etc.) between November 2007 and the time they're released will get a FREE upgrade to the new course. So if you haven't bought, say, Excel 101 yet, buy it NOW and you'll get a free upgrade to Excel 101 for Office 2007 when it comes out. Why November 2007? Well, just because that's the date I decided to start offering the special.
There's also the matter of making more Windows Vista courses. Several people have asked about this... yes, these are coming.
I will probably send out an email to all of my customers sometime next month asking you all WHAT I should spend time developing. Photoshop? Web Design? New Office 2007 material? Vista? I'll let you decide.
Well, that's it. That's what my plans for the the next couple months are.
15 years ago
