Mentor Media Group Extends Suite of e-Learning Solutions for Microsoft Office 2000 With Mentor™ for Word and Mentor™ for Excel

Norwalk, Connecticut, USA, 06 April 2001 -- Using Microsoft Excel and Word just got easier for employees and a lot less costly for employers to support. Mentor Media Group, the industry-leading content developer in multimedia e-Learning, has released two new communication, learning and support tools that can make users immediately successful with Microsoft Office 2000—without any classroom training or computer-based courses.

"Companies spend a lot on these upgrades, but they can't realize any return on any technology investment if their people don't know how to use it." says Dan Gallo, CEO of Mentor Media Group. "Mentor is an extremely cost-effective way to make sure your people aren't slowed down by updated user interfaces and then immediately use the enhanced functionality in Excel and Word 2000. Mentor also gets around the fact that people do anything they can to avoid leaving their work to get software training."

Mentor™ for Word 2000 and Mentor™ for Excel 2000 are the latest additions to the suite of Mentors for Microsoft Office that let employees master their new or upgraded software applications as they are using them. Whenever a person is stuck or has a question about how to perform a task, Mentor provides the answer in the form of a short, dynamic, show-and-tell demonstration. The effectiveness of this on-demand learning, and its impact on reducing help desk demands have resulted in the rapid acceptance of the company's flagship Mentor™ applications, which are currently licensed to over six million corporate users worldwide.

Mentor is integrated into Word and Excel, so whenever a user needs to see how to do something, the answer is available just by clicking the Mentor icon. Users see and hear a 30-to 90-second demonstration and can immediately perform the same steps themselves. "These latest releases are part of our strategy to provide a single communication, learning and support solution for the core load of every corporate desktop," says Scott McEwen, Vice President of Sales. "The effectiveness of Mentor is measured in faster, more effective learning; quicker assimilation and deployment of new technology; reduced training, help desk, and support costs; and earlier, larger returns on investments."

"This is the most natural, intuitive, and non-intrusive way to show users how to get the most value from Word and Excel," says Product Manager David Dale. "Even though Microsoft's built-in help features animated characters, the help itself is text-based. Mentor delivers multimedia instruction with a human voice, providing them the closest thing there is to actually having someone in the office to show and tell you how to use all of the tools at your disposal."

Mentor™ for Word 2000 extends users' knowledge beyond the program's basic functions with more than 240 just-in-time multimedia demonstrations. For example, it shows users how to incorporate pictures, graphics, tables and hyperlinks and shows how to transform Word documents into HTML Web pages and PDF files, as well as other advanced features.

With 162 just-in-time demonstrations, Mentor™ for Excel 2000 takes users through the basic, frequently used attributes of the popular spreadsheet application and into dimensions of the product many users do not know exist. Users are shown how to share spreadsheets online and how to create interactive spreadsheets using preset formulas and automatic calculations. Mentor also shows users how to import data from other worksheets, perform detailed financial analyses, build business models, and manage lists, among its many typically unexplored features.

About Mentor Media Group
Mentor Media Group (formerly VSI Communications Group) is a leading business communications company offering custom and off-the-shelf e-learning solutions. With over 6-million user seats sold, its flagship product, Mentor™ helps companies get more out of their new technology by making users successful the moment the technology is deployed. Mentors are appropriate for a wide variety of products and services offered by software developers, hardware manufactures, ISPs, makers of wireless devices, and developers of e-commerce sites or exchanges.

Mentor delivers just-in-time, multimedia support via local networks, CD-ROMs, local hard drives, or streamed over the Internet. Mentor products are available in multiple languages for Lotus products such as Notes, Sametime, QuickPlace, and TeamRoom; for popular Microsoft products such as Windows 2000, Windows Me, Outlook 2000, Word, Excel, and Internet Explorer; as well as for Netscape Navigator and custom applications. Mentor has become a learning standard at Fortune 500 companies such as IBM, DuPont, DaimlerChrysler, GE Capital, Duke Energy, and Colgate-Palmolive. Mentor can be experienced online at http://www.trymentor.com.

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