New clients! Welcome to you all!

Quality MS Office training – word is spreading!

It’s been a busy few months for us here at The IT Service!

We’ve been delighted to work with a whole raft of new clients over the past few months, so we thought we should give them an official “Welcome” to our family!

Back in January…

Our new year started with a new client – always a great way to kick things off. ComRes, political pollsters to The Independent newspaper (among many others) got in touch to ask if we could run a 2-day Microsoft Access introduction, and of course we were happy to oblige.

Then came a call from Hypertac, a world leading provider of “high performance interconnect solutions for the most demanding applications” (you’ll need to ask them…) They too wanted to know how to build a Microsoft Access database. Three people attended the training, and we covered the basics of setting up a new database, the theory behind it, how to create relationships (and why they matter), database normalisation (making sure that everything in your database is in the right place), creating queries, creating forms…. A packed couple of days!

January also saw a return to an existing client, but in a new role. Last year, we were delighted to provide training for Gradko International a forensic laboratory in Winchester, who provide testing and analysis services to organisations and companies around the world. Now we’re back there – this time actually building a database from scratch.

The MS Access database will manage the entire business at Gradko – tracking customers, their quotes and orders, booking out analysis tubes to clients, tracking when they’re returned, the analysis required and when the work is done and by whom. Then it will track when the tube is reconditioned, and make it available in stock to go out to a new customer. Add in automatically generating emails to clients, producing charts showing bottle-necks in the system and dynamically managing analysis queues… and the database is going to be busy!

February… the month of love… of training!

As we’ve mentioned elsewhere here on the blog, February saw our first visit to the people behind such luminaries of the music world as Eric Clapton, Led Zeppelin and Iron Maiden. Specifically, Rock-It Cargo provide the logistics that get the show on the road (and off again at the venues!) For Rock-It, we provided 3 days of Microsoft Excel training, from absolute basics to more advanced skills such as PivotTables.

March – what better time to learn Excel and PowerPoint?!

In March we paid a first visit to the London-based advertising agency Mars \ Y&R. Mars had a new member of staff who needed to brush up on their Microsoft Office skills. But they didn’t want a whole day on one topic, so we spent the morning working on Excel, and the afternoon taking a look around Microsoft Word and Microsoft PowerPoint. It’s the sort of flexibility that we can offer our clients that you just don’t get if you book onto a standard course in a classroom environment.

April showers… a sprinkling of new clients

With the arrival of April, we’ve seen a great month for new clients.

Firstly, RPS Group – a multi-national organisation who describe themselves as “an international consultancy providing advice upon the exploration and production of energy and other natural resources and the development and management of the built and natural environment”. Once again, Microsoft Access was the focus, with a two-day course looking at designing a new database to allow them to track project all over the world, with the accompanying legislative overhead that you might expect from such a complex area.

Thorne ETS then paid a visit to our office for a one-day overview of Microsoft Access database design – and not only were we able to provide a grounding in the theory of database design, but by the end of the day, we’d built the tables and relationships that will be the foundation of the database for this tax consultancy. Special mention to Thorne for being the first client ever to issue payment for their course before we’d even created an invoice!!!

Next came the world-renowned Imperial College, London who provided possibly the biggest training room we’ve ever seen – over 50 PCs all ready to go – and one of the nicest lunches (Sushi? Wraps? Chocolate or fruit? Rolls or sandwiches? Take your pick…) you’ve ever seen! Not only that, they provided some of the nicest delegates you could want to meet too! Together we explored Excel. Database functions (DMAX, DCOUNT, DSUM and so on). PivotTables. A touch of Excel VBA, and a dab of advanced sorting. Some time on analysis functions, and look at nested Ifs, VLOOKUP, HLOOKUP, ISNA and lots of other functions.

And next week we’re off to meet MGM Advantage. They are one of the fastest growing companies in their sector, and are an award winning company who “provide innovative retirement income solutions to help people make the most of their hard-earned pension savings when they retire.” We’re going to be working with them for a couple of days next week to provide a mixture of Excel and PowerPoint training for their staff. Rather than a day of Excel and a day of PowerPoint, we’ve decided to group it at two levels, with an introductory day of Excel and PowerPoint and then a more advanced day on the two applications.

We were able to work out who would best fit in each group thanks to our online Excel quiz assessment tool. This is a service that we provide free of charge to our potential clients, which just lets us get an objective idea of the level at which to pitch the training. No pressure, no “pass-or-fail” mark, but a good way to ensure that we can give you just what you need.

Providing advice from the USA to the Bahamas!

Okay, so actually the USA and the Bahamas aren’t that far apart, but in addition to the training, we’ve provided advice to people from the United States of America and the Bahamas in the past week alone! So, if you’ve got a question, just get in touch – we’d love to hear from you and we never charge for a bit of advice!

Roll on May!

It’s been a packed few months to start the year! And we love it – getting to know new clients is always really interesting. It also helps us – we get to see what you’re doing with Microsoft Office, and can draw on that in our training to other clients.

Why not give us a call on 01483 277172 and see what we can do to help you.