Doreen's quick, easy typing course

Hullo, I am Doreen.

I have lived all my life in beautiful New Zealand in the South Pacific. My home is in the hilly suburb of Kaikorai in the City of Dunedin, about the frost line, just below the snow line in winter. Summer days can be spent enjoying our long white sand beaches with rolling surf and in autumn the colourful hues of the leaves make wonderful displays. The hill suburbs have lovely harbour views and the Pacific Ocean can be seen past the long harbour peninsula. Dunedin has two ports and many of the largest cruise ships come frequently to Port Chalmers at our harbour entrance and tourists visit our City.

From a wonderful marriage I have one daughter and three sons and I am now a proud grandmother and great-grandmother.

My interest in typing began when I started a Commercial Course at High School at age 13. I have found my typing skills very useful at work and for personal use in many areas.

A lot of my life centred round music - piano/singing/choirs/orchestra - and for many years I was a full time piano teacher. My teaching of typing began in 1972 at a private High School, for girls ages 13-18 and continued there for 17 years. In 1984 I became involved with teaching wordprocessing using various systems on the old Apple Computers. Systems changed many times while I later taught at two other High Schools and our Polytechnic tertiary college where older girls and boys were included. In each of these positions I was required to prepare courses and enter students in school and Pitman examinations for typing and wordprocessing with much success. The photograph on the right was taken in 1988.

Meantime computers and systems changed and improved and I have updated several times. At present I am using Windows XP with Word 97.

In recent years I have been tutoring at SeniorNet Otago Inc where ages range from 50-90 years. Many of the members have never used a typewriter and computing is a whole new area for them. Some have arthritic fingers, or shaky hands and also find 'hunting for the letter keys' a real problem.

For this reason I designed a quick 2-day Course using a new revolutionery method of introducing the letter keys based on the grouping of letters in our English words and teaching how to use traditional typing fingering to avoid excessive energy and risk of RSI.

Now I have expanded and improved the pages of my Course to include Beginners, Advanced and Keyboard Shortcut sections to put on this Web Site where it is freely available to any who think it will be useful to them at their stage of typing. It should be suitable for most computers using Microsoft Windows and any version of Word.

Please feel free to print out whichever pages you wish as you will find it easier to work from a printed page in front of you. I hope you enjoy my Course and find it useful.

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