• Microsoft Project courses are offered both online and offline.lecture hall image by GeoM from Fotolia.com
  
  Microsoft Project is a software program from Microsoft which is designed for project managers to keep track of who and what is being used by a given project. It is part of the Microsoft Office list of programs in the sense that it is called Microsoft Office Project and it can integrate with other Office programs; however, the program is a separate program, which is not sold together with Microsoft Office and which is often not included in basic Microsoft Office training. For those who need a course in Microsoft Office Project, several exist, both online and offline.
  
  

Webucator

• The Webucator Project course is a two-day seminar, offered online for $490 (as of 2010) or offline at your office (you will need to request a price for the course). The course covers most things that a basic user of Project needs to know including creating a new project, adding resources, including people and nonhuman resources (such as computers, projectors, specialized equipment etc.) and scheduling times for them. The course will also show you how to figure out how much your project will cost using the built-in tools from Project (Project allows you to input the cost of any resource, including people). Finally, the course will show you how to reuse the information so that you don’t need to enter everything again for a similar project.
  
  

Training Connection

• Similarly to the course from Webucator, the Training Connection Microsoft Project course will teach you all the basic functions of Microsoft Project in a two-day seminar-style course. Again, as with the Webucator course, you will learn how to create and manipulate a new project using MS Project, how to reuse data from previous projects and how to display the information graphically or create reports. Unlike the Webucator program, this course is offered only offline at the Training Connection offices in either Chicago or Los Angeles and the cost of the course, as of 2010, is $695. The class size is also limited to no more than 10 participants.
  
  

Expert Rating

• Like the other two courses in this roundup, the Expert Rating course is designed to give you the necessary tools to learn the basics of using Microsoft Project. However, unlike the other two programs, this course is a “do it at your own pace” type of course where there is no instructor explaining things. Instead, the course is a purely online course which (in 2010) costs just $129.99.