Microsoft Office Productivity Skills

Microsoft Office — Word, Excel and PowerPoint — is still the most widely used productivity suite in Sri Lankan schools, universities, government offices and businesses. Our 8-week Microsoft Office Productivity Skills course teaches Grade 6–12 students to use Office like a professional, not just like a hobbyist.

Word: proper document formatting using styles (not just bold and italic), tables of contents, headers and footers, citations and bibliographies for school assignments, mail-merge, and templates. Excel: formulas, key functions (SUM, AVERAGE, IF, VLOOKUP, INDEX/MATCH, COUNTIF), data sorting and filtering, pivot tables, charts, conditional formatting, and basic data analysis. PowerPoint: slide design, smart layouts, tasteful animations, embedding charts from Excel, and how to actually present (not just read off slides).

Students complete real assignments that look just like school and exam work — a properly formatted O/L science research report, an A/L school budget spreadsheet, a research presentation, a tuition-class registration form with mail-merge, and an end-of-course exam-style portfolio piece. Each one is reviewed and graded by the teacher.

This course is aligned with the Sri Lankan O/L ICT syllabus and helps students score top marks in the practical components. It's also genuinely useful for school assignments and university coursework. Required: a laptop with Microsoft Office — we'll show students how to get free Office through their school's M365 A1 if available, or use the free online versions.

Course Outline

• Weeks 1–2: Word — styles, ToC, references, mail-merge
• Weeks 3–4: Excel — formulas, functions, charts
• Week 5: Excel — pivot tables + data analysis
• Weeks 6–7: PowerPoint — design + presenting
• Week 8: Integrated final project