[ribbon hero] Game your way to Office mastery

I've been learning a lot of new faces, approaches, methods, processes, toys (blackberry would be one) ... and also tools lately. That's what happens when you change jobs. One of the changes was that I switched from Lotus Notes to Outlook mail, and from an older version of MS Office to the Office 2010 suite. It is the version that introduced the ribbon bar that is quite different from earlier versions.

Remember the times half of the bookshop would be filled with computer 'how to' guides? I did not use a book to upskill myself to Office 2010. I did not do the last century off-the-shelve e-learning course either. No, I convinced our IT guy to install Ribbon Hero 2 on my laptop and every day I'm spending a few minutes to game my way to mastery. (Yeah, that's another thing, I'm not administrator on my own laptop anymore, I need to ask...)

Ribbon Hero is a free download from the Office Labs site. It installs the game -integrated within Office- with levels that relate to a story on that annying little Clippy helper from earlier versions of Office time travelling through various ages, each with their challenging Office tasks. Those tasks will open up the appropriate Office application where you have a worksheet with what to achieve, and some hints is you would get stuck. Solve it without using hints, and you get more points. But you don't have to use the game levels. The game also installs in the ribbon and will automatically give you points as you are using more features of the tool suite.

Why is this a great example for IT training?

• It uses the engagement techniques of games and play. The trendy word for that is 'gamification'. I admit it works. It is addictive to just go in for 5 or 10 minutes.
• You don't have to play, it also scores you as you are using more advanced features in your day to day work. It integrates with 'real work'.
• It is spaced over time, giving you the time to discover the deep functionalities that will set you apart as an Office power user. I once saw studies stating that it takes people on average more time to get to use new features than the time cycle of new versions coming on the market.
• It gives you many "I did not know you could do that" experiences, luring you slowly into better using the tool and its full feature set.

What could be better? I'd love it to have a social component, like a leaderboard where you see the scores of the entire department.

All in all, a good trend in IT end user training. Maybe this is something you need to try out next Friday afternoon, or convince the IT department to just deploy it. What is the worst that could happen? You having fun finding new features to use for work?