Not male office workers, male administrative assistants. It’s a specific kind of office worker.
I’m a woman and I use Microsoft Office products. They are so handy for all the important things that a woman does!
Word - Great for grocery lists and chatty Christmas newsletters. I even use clip art!
Excel - I use it for my nail polish list. I can sort by brand OR color!
Powerpoint - I make family photo slide shows for family gatherings. Everybody loves them!
Outlook - So easy to forward inspirational emails and kitten pictures!
Access - I never was able to figure out how to use Access really effectively and I’ve reached the point where I need to learn it properly. I’ve spent the last 6-8 months compiling a master database with extensive information on each asset in my company’s portfolio ($4 billion+ total). The information is siloed all over the place, and it’s been a beast of a job, especially since things need to be updated regularly and I’m sussing out all sorts of discrepancies that need to be resolved. The results have been outstanding, but it’s in Excel. With 75+ columns of data for each asset, it’s way past the stage where it should be in a proper database. My reporting document is a thing of beauty and works perfectly (yay for Hlookups!), but it does take a little finagling because I’m essentially forcing Excel to act like Access. So I’m thinking of taking my first computer class since 1989 and learning to do the Access thing right. So I guess that means I’ll be yet another woman in a Microsoft Office class, tee hee.
Sarcasm off the starboard bow!
If I had a sister, I’d hope she’d of turned out sarcastic just like you.
You may be on to something.
I know, right? It’s cracking me up that some people are talking like Office apps are the province of administrative assistants. Even VP-types who have admins need to have proficiency in Word, Excel, etc.
It’s also a job title that covers an incredibly broad and diverse range of duties. In my experience, capable admins often end up doing work way above their title/status/pay grade, but unfortunately get stuck on the “admin track.”
To be honest, I get annoyed with people who seem unable to educate themselves in how to expand their skills in ordinary software like Excel or Acrobat. I can see how classes can be helpful, but they can only skim the surface of a program’s capabilities. I think it’s a mind-set, and one that holds people back from finding better and more efficient ways to do their work. One of the best tips I ever got was this: if you have a software question, type it into google in ordinary language. I don’t even bother with the native help function on anything any more. Usually, the official help page pops up on the google search anyway and more importantly, someone somewhere has invariably asked the exact same question on some forum somewhere and I’ll end up with a better answer from there. (One time it led me to an sdmb thread, much to my amusement.) I’ve run into a wall with Access though. I don’t even know what questions to ask. As far as I’ve ever heard, it’s unlike other MS products in that it’s not designed such that a casual user can just pick it up so I don’t feel too bad about it.
Orthogonally, is there any good reason why Access is included in the standard microsoft office suite? The other four components, Word, Outlook, Powerpoint, and Excel, all seem like general-purpose office apps that any office worker would use. But a database package seems like it’s a lot more specialized.
Gee, I’ll have to make a note of this, in case I’m ever single again. Are they hot?
Seriously, I suspect the reason is fairly straightforward and doesn’t require sexism on the part of the observer. Anyone with an office job needs these skills. However, people who are hired for other skills don’t need to prove it, and they can generally pick it up on the job. After all, there was no MS Office when I went to school in the 70’s. I picked it up along the way.
But a lot of people are looking for entry level office admin / assistant positions, who don’t have any special skill. These people need to be able to show MSO capability, but might not be able to afford a copy of MS at home (it’s not cheap!) and even if they did, might not know the kinds of things they’d be expected to do at the office.
My guess is that more women than men are looking for entry level office admin / assistant positions, without any particular relevant skillset, and these represent a large number of the students. (Also, people who are looking to move up in the office admin job chain and want to be able to demonstrate more MSO skills.)
Then the question shifts to why more women than men are in or are looking for office admin positions. I suspect that’s just a cultural/historical bias.
But then again, it might just be for the same reason that most women feel free to stop and ask directions, but men tend not to.
I don’t quite know how to answer this with scientific terms but I do know that I come across Access being used in offices a lot. I come across Excel-improperly-used-as-database more often, but databases are very much a part of offices. Access does a lot more than just holds data. One of the big things I see is writing forms (in Access) that are connected to the database that neatly collect the data for storage and reporting.
You may not see Access as much anymore because it’s smart and relatively cheap to get a Web application set up that both your office and your clients can use to fill in forms and send data to the SQL/MySQL database for storage and reporting. No more physical files on the office document server. But if you don’t have that, or before you had that, there was Access (and you can also have an Access backend to a Web site instead of SQL or MySQL, if you are so brave.)
Years ago I set up something in Access for generating failure analysis reports on returned semiconductor devices. I typed in the customer number and all the customer information got populated in the report: Name, Address, Main Contact, etc. Then I typed in the device part number and all the device information got populated: name, package style, etc. Also when a fault code got entered, all the information regarding that type of fault code was populated.
It was a nice efficiency gain once I set it all up.
I think Learjeff has the best answer to the OP’s question.
I have Access. But have no idea why or what I would use it for.
First, to the bbolded part - who taught you IT’s secret?! 
Seriously, this IS what IT/tech support does about 98% of the time if someone nearby doesn’t know offhand or if you don’t remember the fix from the last time you googled it. 
Which connects to the italicized part - absofreakinglutely. But I don’t necessarily BLAME them. The attitude is sloooowly changing, but computer skills have been portrayed as super complicated specialized knowledge (like genius hackers, or Silicon Valley wizards or just the noticeably ‘different’ nerds). It’s a subconscious belief that they CAN’T learn this stuff, which is not not not true.
Yes. Trial starts next Tuesday.
Damn them? Nay, thank them. If you have to be an old maid, you’ll need a good job. Maybe, as a secretary, you can snag a man. Remember, tho: always smile, or you’ll probably stay a spinster!
The only Office class I took was Access, and it had a pretty even division amongst the sexes. The thing about Access is that it’s really more of a programming language. An Access database designed the way we were taught doesn’t need someone who understands how Access works. For day-to-day administration, it’s just like filling in those web-based forms. You don’t need to know access to enter or call up data, just to design the database and what you can do with it.
The only reason I can come up with for Access to come with Office is that people use Access to access its databases, rather than the other methods available. It is simpler, I guess.
It’s because their brains are 1/3 the size of a man’s. It’s science!
Seriously though, people take MS Office classes? I just thought it was something people just picked up from being alive after 1995.
Given where the jobs are, especially the better paying ones, what I am wondering about is why these women (and our male op) are aiming for entry level office admin/assistants work instead of learning Computer Numerical Control and looking for work in the manufacturing sector.
Also cultural/historical bias?
Why does everyone refer to “twenty-years ago” as if it were the 1950’s?
Refer to the chart about a third down. Women have been closing in on 50% of the U.S. workforce since 1985.
Excel is really only useful as the back end of your database. The reporting is much easier in Access, once you know how to use it, which I do not, because it’s more fun to force excel to do it. It’s amazing what you can combine those functions to do.
But once you start using Visual Access in Excel you should probably move onto Access.
I didn’t know that men have no interest in any work beyond manual labor.
Honestly, what do you think women do at work all day, that they wouldn’t be using Office?