Editorial
Front Page - Friday, September 18, 2009
Course to teach Realtors what they don’t know about Microsoft
Samara Litvack
Continuing education classes are offered regularly at the Chattanooga Association of Realtors, and they span a variety of topics, from adapting business plans to the current economy to becoming more “green” and reducing carbon footprints.
Every now and then, a course comes along that addresses topics most Realtors – and everyone else in the world, for that matter – think they’ve already mastered. One such course, Marketing with Microsoft, is coming to the Chattanooga Association of Realtors at the end of the month, and it aims to teach its students more about Microsoft than they have ever learned before.
“It’s really an eye opener for a lot of people,” says course instructor Pat Zaby. “It’s not just a class about teaching people how to do keystrokes and stuff like that.”
This course teaches students how to utilize the tools that most of them already have at their fingertips. Microsoft is the most common application program out there, says Zaby, and learning how to use its programs can help Realtors better serve their clients.
“The most common thing people say when they’re in this class is, ‘You’re kidding. I didn’t know it would do that,’” he says. “We get people that come into this class thinking they really know how to use Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Outlook and then all of a sudden, by 10 o’clock, they say, ‘I can’t believe I’ve written down so many things that I need to start doing.’”
Zaby compared the wealth of unused potential inside a computer to that inside the common cell phone. Most phone owners know how to make calls. Many can even send text messages. But most phones come equipped with functions the majority of phone owners will never even discover, much less access.
“That’s the same thing with software, except you multiply it by a hundred,” says Zaby.
He credits this to the fact that most people learn just the basics on a computer, essentially what they need to know to perform their jobs properly. While this method usually gets the job done, he argues that if you know more about your computer’s software, you can do more, do it better and it will work more to your advantage.
For example, many people use the “blind carbon copy” function when sending e-mails to multiple recipients. There are ways, says Zaby, to send out mass messages and still give clients the impression that each e-mail is written specifically with him in mind. Marketing with Microsoft teaches students how to use the “mail merge” function, so that each message seems to be written individually.
Another part of the course teaches students to use Microsoft Word to build flyers. Many people use Publisher or PowerPoint because they’re easy to use, says Zaby, but Word is more powerful than either of these programs.
“Not only can we show them how to move pictures around on a page any way they want it, we can make them change their default settings so that whenever they put a picture on a page, it’s easily moved,” he says. “We teach them how to make Word behave like Publisher, and the benefits are that more people can open the documents and they’re smaller files, which makes them easier to e-mail.”
In Word, students are also taught to build tables that can be used for reports, which can then be sent by e-mail. This method of doing things, versus printing and sending via snail mail, cuts cost, looks better and is delivered to clients much more
quickly.
Zaby distributes a 200-plus-page workbook in which students follow along during the course. During instruction, Zaby demonstrates his lessons using PowerPoint slides and actual computer projection.
“They’re following along in their books that have step-by-step instructions, so that when they go back to their offices, they can duplicate exactly what they saw in class,” he says. “This allows us to cover more material in a day’s time.”
Marketing with Microsoft has been taught for nearly five years, and Zaby says students keep returning to take it two, three and four times. While the course material is updated as the software changes, he says the reason people come back again and again is because there is just that much material to be covered.
“It’s that old adage, ‘When the student’s ready, the teacher will appear,’” he says. “They may have heard it the first time they were in class but they didn’t put two and two together. They didn’t apply it. That sort of thing.”
And, Zaby admits, even he learns something different each time he teaches the course.
“There’s a dynamic that takes place in the class,” he says. “When everybody’s using the same stuff, they have a tendency to use it ever so slightly different. So somebody will say one thing and that will spur somebody to say something else.”
Marketing with Microsoft will be taught on Sept. 25, 2009, from 8:30 a.m. until 4:30 p.m., at the CAR office. The price of the course is $129, and students who attend will earn seven CLE hours. To register for the class, contact Linda Maffett at CAR, at 423-698-8001.
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