For this edition of featured five free videos, I’ve chosen five sample movies from lynda.com courses in our Business segment, all geared toward the needs of the administrative professional. This weekend a group of those amazing folk who keep business running and thriving is gathering in Texas for their Education Forum and Annual Meeting. The theme of the conference is focused more than ever on education and training, and our Business segment has some excellent follow-up accompaniment to those sessions. (Of course, solid training in business-related topics doesn’t just pertain to administrative pros!)

One of our most popular authors for Business tools training, Gini Courter, will be teaching several sessions at EFAM, and I thought it was a good time to round up some of the excellent training Gini and her fellow lynda.com Business authors have created.

Viewing the task and to-do lists in Outlook from Outlook 2010: Time Management With Calendar and Tasks

In this video, Gini Courter reviews the difference and view options for Outlook’s Tasks and To-Do lists.  If you’re already using Outlook for email, these are definitely features that allow you to turn email into activity. The course focuses on how to use Outlook 2010 to handle both business and personal schedules, from making appointments, to creating and completing tasks, to color-coding calendars and tasks for at-a-glance review.

Responding to Twitter @mentions from Social Media Marketing with Facebook and Twitter

In this video, our popular Social Media Maven Anne-Marie Concepción explains how you can use the @mention feature on Twitter to hear what people are saying or asking about your company. Social media has become a critical activity for many businesses, and Anne-Marie’s course covers not only the fundamentals of social media marketing, but also the basics of creating a top-level online presence.

Choosing the fonts for your Word document from Word 2010 Essential Training

For any business document, the recipients gets their first impression from the way you choose to format your words, particularly which font you choose. In this movie, Gini Courter goes over font formatting in Word documents so you can choose the font that best serves your communication. The course this movie comes from delves into the functionality at the heart of Word: creating, editing, and formatting documents.

Understanding how to hold effective meetings from Effective Meetings

Meetings that feel like a waste of time or a confusing deluge of information are a common occurence. In this movie, Dave Crenshaw discusses the three principles that inform an effective meeting. Dave’s course is focused on establishing a simple, usable framework to get the most from meetings, and provides insight into how to effectively schedule, conduct, and follow up on meetings.

What can you do with InfoPath? from InfoPath 2010 Essential Training

We’ve all had to face forms in our business days that are tedious and complicated to read, let alone fill out correctly. Microsoft InfoPath allows you to develop a clear, beautiful, effective form, so that the information can be gathered and analyzed easily. (And for EFAM attendees, you’ll get an in-depth view from the presenter herself!)

Whether you’re an administrative pro on your way to Texas for EFAM, someone holding down the fort (and holding the fort together) day-to-day, or just a person who wants to thrive in the business environment, the Business segment in our library is dedicated to helping you develop critical skills. Let us know if there are other topics you’d like to see addressed in our library in the future.