10 Free Online Tutorials to Boost Your Skills

Not long ago, in a meeting with Microsoft product managers, I saw some research on how most users of productivity applications use only a tiny fraction of the features available to them. In addition to that fact, many people shell out big bucks for expensive courses and books on the applications that they use most. You can beat all these problems, though, if you spend some time looking into the best application tutorials online. Many of them are very visual, and give you the opportunity to experiment with the lessons within the lessons themselves. In this post, I’ll round up some good examples for popular applications, and development topics such as CSS and JavaScript. Perhaps you’ll find time to brush up on your skills over the long weekend.

If you spend a lot of time in Microsoft Word, Baycon Group has a good free tutorial for older versions of Word, and Microsoft itself offers a big series of online tutorials for Word 2007. You’ll find lessons on using XML, and working with templates and document libraries.


For free tutorials on other Microsoft productivity applications, including Excel, Outlook, and Access browse the Office Online site.

If you spend your day using GMail, Google has a categorized set of tutorials online that allows you to brush up on any concepts you need to. The categories include instruction on organizing your inbox, finding messages, and much more.

Are you a Photoshop user? Luxa is an extremely rich—and fun–Photoshop tutorial site, and few programs have feature sets as deep as Photoshop’s, so spend some time there if you want to improve your skills. There are tutorials on everything from making good looking business cards, to how to work with special effects and filters.

Want to brush up on HTML? Take a look at the scads of free online tutorials at W3Schools. You can even work within an HTML editor on the site and use a test button to view how your published results will look.

W3Schools also has arrays of online tutorials on more advanced web development topics, such as CSS and JavaScript.

Do you know of any good online tutorials?

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