…You have to wire it up, install the software, connect it to the printer, get it connected to the web, make the email work, sort out connection to wi-fi, make sure the virus protection is both the right sort and that it works. 

After you have plugged all the wires in the right holes, you probably want to eradicate all those stupid pop-up screens that have been put there to frighten you into buying all sorts of things you don’t need and generally put it into a condition where you can, forever after, switch it on and just use it without any undue frustration.

Call me. I  will do all this for you. I have put together a special set-up package for new computers which will sort all these things out, leaving you to switch on and use your new computer without feeling like you wish you’d never bought it in the first place!

You might as well sign up for every free course going – ask at your local library. You will learn a lot, but some of it will be lessons in ‘not quite what you want’ on a machine that is not quite like your own  - and the teacher is never there when something goes wrong at home.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could call someone up who would just talk you through the problem, solve it and set you on your way? Maybe they could pop over and sort it out personally and show you on your own machine. 

This is what I would call a ‘Computer Buddy’. For a small fee I will be available on the end of the phone and/or to occasionally visit to handle any problems you may encounter.

Just call to sort out problems over the phone

I have been test-driving this concept on my father ever since he bought a computer about fifteen years ago. He lives about a hundred miles away and so most of it is done on the phone.

He probably calls me once or twice a month and from time to time I go over there and take him through one thing or another. Typically the phone will go and he will start the conversation with “This bloody computer…” Then we will talk through and solve things like:

• Internet connections
• Is his ISP ripping him off
• Extracting his address book onto stickers for Christmas Cards
• Getting his iPhone to work on holiday but not cost him a fortune in roaming charges
• Problems with his router
• Getting his email to work
• Stopping Spam
• Getting online services to work
• Digital photography
• Putting pictures on the web
• Editing video
• Lots of other things

Call me on 07017 343434 and I can talk you through how I might be able to help you as a computer buddy.

I would ask for a £25 per month retainer for providing a seven days per week, 52 weeks per year service. The service allows for as many as one home visits per month and five calls per week. You can arrange payment for this through a credit or debit card by using the button below (not the one on the right hand side of the screen)

Computer courses tend to be a bit general. You usually take a course in a specific bit of software, split into beginner, intermediate and advanced sub-courses. But what if you just need to know how to e.g set up a letterhead in Word, sort out your auto signature, create an expenses sheets and put a small website together quickly without having to learn how to write code. It might be a pick ‘n’ mix of all sorts of things across all sorts of software.

Well there is no reason why you should not be able to cut a swathe across all these things. In fact it a good idea. There is an 80:20 dynamic to all this. 80% of what you need from any bit of software is available from 20% of its total functionality. It is a better  idea to decide what you need to get from a range of programs, draw a line round them all and learn how to those things.

You could set up your stationery in Word, create a gallery online for your relatives to look at the family snaps, set up some calendar  birthday reminders, to jog you into getting presents on time, whatever you want. You can tell me what you are trying to achieve, I can help you understand what is possible, then we can put a collection of things together and I will teach you how to do them. Whatever you want, you name it. 

In fact that just about covers it “You name it” and I will teach you how to do it and provide materials and backup in case you forget anything.

With thanks to my cousin Ali for this great idea. Ali is a teacher and, by all accounts, a very good one. So good, that she stopped being a teacher and now advises education authorities all over the country about implementing healthy food standards, not least in Yorkshire where she is based. 

By graphic design I am really referring to the arrangement of pictures and text into a format for printing. ‘How to Do: Graphic Design’ focuses on the software and button pushing skills needed to produce cards, flyers, brochures, posters and all the things I get to do for my children’s school fayre and the village fete and so on. There are interpretive skills you can bring to bear here, giving your creativity a platform to express itself. I can certainly give you a few pointers here, having taught graphic design to university undergraduates and having designed graphics for some of the biggest companies in the world.

In the professional world we use a range of tools, predominantly PhotoShop, Illustrator, Quark Xpress, InDesign and a few others. These tools have set the standard and pretty much all other graphic design tools are based on these, meaning that if you can use one, you can pretty much use them all. This makes it very easy for me to teach you how to use any set of graphic tools. In fact most computer’s come with some, if not all, of what you need to produce these sorts of things. If not, they are readily available as cheap or free options. The sort of progams you might have on your machine are MicroSoft Publisher, Apple iWork, Paint, PaintShop, PhotoShop (and PhotoShop Essentials), Aperture and many others.

After a few pointers and a bit of practice you will be able to produce your own newsletters, personal business cards, flyers, posters, menus, letterheads …in fact just about anything that gets produced as printed material. All you have to do is either print it from your own printer or take it along to anyone of  thousands of high street, or online professional printing companies to become a ‘published’ designer.

…and there you have it!

Call me on 07017 343434 to learn How to Do: Graphic Design.

Audio editing on a computer is where you use software to edit, record, mix, apply effects and convert audio between different formats. You can produce a CD to listen to on your hi-fi, you can make files for use on an MP3 layer or to use as sound tracks on videos. Once made, you can place the files anywhere from CDs and DVDs to the internet.

Some computers already have audio editing software installed. On the Mac, Garage Band is a particularly good tool for music creation and editing. However, if not, then you might want to consider the following digital audio editor software packages:

Audacity Free Digital Audio Editor. This is the most common and one of the best bits of the free audio software around. It will work on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and GNU/Linux.

Sound Forge Range Of Digital Audio Editors Sound Forge are a well respected name in the world of digital audio editing and offer 3 digital audio editor software packages which are Sound Forge Audio Studio, CD Architect 5 and Sound Forge 8. Possibly a bit advanced for the beginner, but very good.

The affordable price of digital video camcorders and the ever increasing power of the home PC have made high quality digital video editing readily accessible. Indeed, the last few years have seen an explosion in the field of digital video. However, unlike many hobbies, the world of digital video can seem confusing and technically complex. The good news is, that digital video is really quite straightforward, if you know how.

There’s a wealth of information available on the internet and plenty of books on the subject. But for the novice, a steadily paced introduction with a tutor personally showing you how to work it out while you remain free to ask questions as we go. I can provide the novice with a comprehensive introduction to the world of digital video and the associated jargon. More importantly, it may just save you making a very expensive and time-consuming mistake (or two).

It’s easy to see how first time digital video users become frustrated by the technical jargon frequently used in video editing. I believe it is best to take intuitive steps through the digital video process. From buying the right camera and PC equipment, through to shooting techniques, editing and final production. At no stage should you feel frustrated by overly complex explanations.

With this course under your belt you should be well on your way to mastering the techniques and you’ll soon be creating digital video and making your home movies enjoyable and watchable for everyone!

Websites can do many things. You can do your banking, buy your books (and anything else), pay your bills, read the paper and find out about almost anything you want. It all sounds like science fiction – lots of science and bit of a horror story! But, like a lot of computery things, a lot of what seems complex is actually the techno-babble that computer people seem intent on using. The truth is that most websites, do not have much complexity. These days you don’t need to go near code and all most sites are there to do is present images and words, ideally, in a stylish fashion.

If you want to learn how to any of these things I can show you. I have built online banks, online shops, bill paying sites and many, many information sites. Some of the complicated ones would probably take years to teach, but a straightforward website can be designed and built with less confusion than you might imagine.

For a bit of fun, call me on 07017 343434 and for free, I will tell you how to create a ‘Five Minute Web Page’*

*It won’t win any awards, but it will be a web page!

The slides can contain images, videos and text. You can also make the content ‘animate’ and place transitions between slides (such as fade out and fade in and many others) so that moving from one to another has a little more impact.

For professionals…

Many people in business use PowerPoint, and most business people have memories of both good and bad presentations. If you want to learn to use PowerPoint for business use and take a few pointers from a graphic designer about how to make presentations look good, then call me on 07017 343434. I can definitely help.

For the rest of us….

PowerPoint is a great tool to use to collect family pictures, videos and memories together – a sort of photo and Video album. You can publish the results to a web page (easily – no techno-babble) you can email the presentation to others, you can get it onto a DVD and look at it on your television. Of course, you can just turn on your computer and look at the presentation.

I can help anyone who prepares, or oversees the preparation of presentations using Microsoft PowerPoint and needs to understand how. I can cover:

• Creating presentations: Starting from scratch, using different slide layouts, creating and formatting text slides, text effects.
• Using graphics, videos and pictures: Creating and formatting drawings, inserting clip art objects, inserting other pictures, formatting graphics.
• Organising the presentation: Slide sorter view, producing speaker notes and audience handouts, printing.
• Running the slide show: Transition and animation effects

Call me on 07017 343434 and let me help you to get the best out of PowerPoint.

These days, everyone suddenly seems to know how to use Excel. And there is a reason for that. It is very useful. You can use Excel to simply work out quite complicated things. In the work place, budgets, quotes, tax and commissions are routinely assessed using Excel. In the home you can use it to run the household budget, work out how much you can afford to spend on everything from holidays to Christmas. You can also make sure you are not being diddled through complex VAT calculations by jolly tradesmen, plus any number of other things.

With this in mind, I am able to help all levels of Excel user, but I am probably most help to the absolute beginner. I will take you through the basics of creating simple formulas, formatting a worksheet, making a chart and more. In fact most of the things for which you might use Excel are relatively easy to grasp. Call me on 07017 343434 to get started.

Microsoft Word is a word processing software package. You can use it to type letters, reports, and other documents. It gives you the ablilty to use your home computer as well as your business computer for desktop publishing. Although I am aiming this at the computer novice, because Microsoft Word has numerous different versions even experienced users, or people going back into the work place after a career break may find it useful. 

Basically, if you have no experience with Microsoft Word and want to start from the beginning, or if you have some experience with it but want to become more proficient, then you’ve come to the right place. It would be wrong to think of Word as a computer version of a typewriter. Of course it will do that, but it will do much more – letterheads, footers, automated functions, menus, posters and much more - you can even make web pages with it! 

I can help you learn to use Word at all levels. Call me on 07017 343434 to et started.