Yeah. That’s somewhat related to something I’ve always noted: older people always imply that young people all know about computers, but really all most of them know is how to dick around on social media. Very few can actually use computers as you’ve described for employment purposes.
I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind giving a brief description of what kind of task that is? I’m kind of curious.
I never used Outlook before my current job. I figured out how to set up calendar appointments by lunch my first day.
As others said it’s easy to use for the basics but don’t wing it.
If someone is asking if you “know Outlook” the chances are 99% they are using it for the contact manger features. Outlook is long in the tooth and not all that web/cloud friendly. Most businesses have stepped away from Outlook for more powerful net centric email and contact manager apps like gmail. If a business is hanging onto it it’s most often because they have hundreds or thousands of contacts in Outlook format and do not want to have to migrate to another email-contact manager.
You will likely have to know how to do more than just email with Outlook if you want the job.
It’s basically an e-mail program, but companies use the calendar feature in it for scheduling meetings. So my recommendation is to first look on YouTube to see if there are demos and tutorials on it. See if it looks like something you feel you could pick-up quickly or not.
I doubt they would ask you to demonstrate your knowledge of Outlook during the interview.
Speaking of pet peeves, edwardcoast, you have responded to an OP made almost 3.5 days ago with a large number of people already pointing out the same thing.
It would be helpful to read the other posts and figure out that repeating the same info is not necessary!
It is aggregations from tables from one of our live databases. I can’t remember what the actual data values are but we relabel everything and turn it into sales data for a fictitious candy wholesaler broken up by product, region, customer, value, period and a few other things. The questions are simple things involving finding medians, averages, trends and making a forecast or two. We just make up a few each time we use the data.
We don’t really care about the answers. You can derive them just using sorts, filters and a few functions iteratively or you can pivot stuff up and go wild. There is crap data in there that some people spot and report on. There are wild outliers that throw out aggregations, some people spot them. The forecasts we ask for can’t really be done without any background economic data but again we care more that you drew a conclusion than we care about its usefulness. We generally don’t ask for charts etc, again so that the good candidates can add them on their own initiative.
As I said it’s a simple test. We ask the applicant to leave all their working and answer the questions separately. A quick glance at the workings is enough to let me know whether they use or are capable of using Excel.
O RLY?
what is “net centric email?”
Nope, I’m 25 and have never used Outlook for a minute. I used Thunderbird for a class once, which I think is similar.
I also have long lost any Word or Excel skills. For probably 4-5 years now I’ve almost exclusively used LaTeX for essays and homework. Originally I used Word for things like English and LaTeX for CS and Physics and such, but I lost my Word disc and Open Office is trash so I transitioned to LaTeX for everything.
Excel I can kind of ad-hoc a few formulas, but I don’t really have any long-term spread sheets. For data processing and chart making and such I mostly just end up using Python with Numpy, R, or Julia.
I finally have an Office license again from my grad school, because Powerpoint is waaaaaay better than the Open Office version and not everywhere allows Prezi. I do miss Word some, for one, writing tables isn’t a complete pain in the ass, but if you wanted me to do anything more complicated than really basic document formatting in Word I’d have to have Google handy.
People use Word for that? I thought that was more InDesign and cousins’ gig.
Word is part of the basic MSOffice package, InDesign isn’t. That creates both a price barrier and a mental barrier.
Every project I’ve worked with for the last 16 years has involved docs with all kinds of tables, embeddings and whatnot, but they were to be used and shared electronically, and everybody who had access had to be able to edit them. How much would that be, for a company with, say… 60 thousand employees and subcontractors?
I had a project where that’s how the people in the client company used Excel. To search for a piece of data, they’d move the spreadsheet around the screen; they treated it as if it was made of cardboard. Their “megaexpert” from Finance, the guy who came up with the datachecking protocols (us consultants weren’t allowed to), knew how to make pivot tables: he’d compare two tables by making pivots of both and checking that they came up with the same numbers. And if any numbers were different, how do you find the difference?
You guessed it: by the cardboard technique…
Oooh, yeah, definitely bad idea. Can you point me to this person who has said s/he is deciding whether or not to lie and try to get by afterwards? 'Cause I’d like to chime in and tell this person, whoever they are, that it’s a bad idea. Of course all that I’m wondering is whether or not I should skip responding to any listings that ask for knowledge of Outlook since it’s only one item on a list of what they’re looking for in an applicant.
I have no way of knowing how they weight one thing against another. If a job listing asks for “Knowledge of Word, Excel, Outlook, How to Fold a Fitted Sheet, Italian Desserts, Gilbert and Sullivan, How to get Candle Wax out of a Carpet” maybe I know a little of everything except Outlook whereas another job candidate knows Outlook really well but knows nothing of Italian Desserts.
The person doing the interview knows how important it is and can decide to ask about my Outlook skills in the interview if it’s really important. I started this Thread not looking for an excuse to lie but just to get an idea of how important I should assume knowledge of Outlook is when it is just one of a list of things they’re looking for in job applicants.
Yeah, pretty much everything that’s seemed like something I should apply for says something to the effect of “Knowledge of Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, Outlook)”.
And, thanks, LSLGuy. It is kind of frustrating seeing a list of what they want from applicants but no indication of what depth of experience they require.
I think he means webmail services like Gmail as opposed to client/server email like Outlook/Exchange.
And AFAIK most business of any size mostly use Outlook and Exchange. A few large old companies still use Lotus Notes, but that’s disappearing.
Word is pretty much the word processing standard (as in “please send your resume in Word format”.)
Excel is sort of a special case. Pretty much everyone uses it for everything because it’s easy to use. But it also sucks for pretty much every use case. Grid based word processor. Database table. Calculation engine. Even as a project management tool, org chart creator, front-end application interface and a million other uses that can and should be handled more easily and more efficiently by other tools such as Word, Access, SQL Server, Vizio, MS Project, .NET, R, SAS, or whatever.
What do you do? Email them a calendar invite with instructions on where to go to take the test and then pass anyone who shows up?
Agree. So I sort of see this as a generational question.
if you’re 25, and fresh out of grad school or else 8 years out of high school and now trying to move from retail or manual labor to office work for the first time you’ve probably never touched Outlook. Your idea of mainstream apps for calendar, contacts, & email is Gmail, Yahoo, Live.com, etc. Or whatever is factory-installed on your phone.
If you’re over 45 and have worked in offices for decades, and mostly at companies with over a hundred office workers, the question makes no sense. 99% of the emails you’ve ever authored since college have been on Outlook.
We don’t know the OP’s life situation, but it smells to me like it’s real close to the former, and far from the latter.
I’m 56 and I’ll defer to the data maven’s knowledge that most big businesses are still using Outlook, but in my job as a commercial real estate agent I communicate with users a wide swath of businesses and most businesses I am familiar with are moving away from Outlook to other solutions.
This list below is interesting as Outlook is still a major presence (larger than I thought) but Apple’s share of the email client market is astounding.
#1 Apple iPhone 28% +1.34
#2 Gmail 17% -0.51
#3 Apple iPad 12% -0.09
#4 Outlook 8% -0.76
#5 Apple Mail 8% +0.09
#6 Google Android 7% +0.31
#7 Outlook.com 5% -0.28
#8 Yahoo! Mail 4% +0.02
#9 Windows Live Mail 2% -0.05
#10 AOL Mail 1% +0.02
How are those numbers being calculated? If I send an email message from my iPhone or my iPad, it’s going via my Gmail or my Yahoo! Mail account; others in my company (but not me) are set up to send email via their corporate Outlook/Exchange accounts from their iPhones or iPads. So which group do such email messages fall under?
I agree with your suspicion.
I could see how a public mail handler or ISP could easily track where each pull request comes from. And if that’s true, it would give a pretty accurate picture of what email client is used by consumers. And of very small businesses which operate essentially like consumers.
If so, this would ignore essentially 100% of the corporate Exchange & Outlook installations worldwide. Which is where most of the Outlook user base is.
None of whom would show up in stats derived from some retail mail handler.
Having said that …
There’s no doubt Outlook is slowly being obsoleted. My employer has over 100,000 employees. The hard core desk jockeys, all 30,000 plus of them, have Outlook connected to Exchange, and the rest of us for whom corporate email is a minor use case all use OWA to connect to Exchange. Meantime lots of employees also have Exchange going to their iPads or Blackberries or other non-PC devices.
Our corporate IT says their eventual goal is to move all users over to OWA; the challenge is the number of locally-created business processes folks have whipped up that rely on Outlook custom forms or rules or … Plus the tasks and journal stuff which OWA doesn’t exactly support.
Hold on a second there. Your job posting didn’t say anything about knowing how to use a phone.
Your company is reducing the number of installations of the full Outlook software, but they’re still paying for the Exchange licenses and whatever Microsoft charges for each OWA user. It would be more of a concern for Microsoft if your employer were replacing Exchange entirely with another mail server program.
Agreed. But the point remains that thick-client Outlook is on borrowed time as a mainstream product. Office 365 and Live.com and OWA are the future direction.
…I very much prefer an email client vs using gmail online: but unfortunately gmail tabs has absolutely spoiled me. It filters out what I don’t want in my primary email perfectly about 99% of the time: and I can easily find what I’m needing out of the other tabs without having to deal with clutter.
I gave up on outlook about three years ago and have been looking for a replacement since then with no luck. Mailbird comes close: and I quite like Inky. And AOL’s Alto (not a client) is actually quite cool (the “photos” feature is excellent). But I don’t trust myself to set up my filters better than google (which is a sadly depressing thought), so until someone comes up with a client that integrates with the tab I’m gonna stick with gmail online.