Things I Didn't Understand at First: A New Trainer's Honest Take on Open Dental

I have a document on my computer called "Things I Didn't Understand at First."

It started as a place to dump questions during my training so I wouldn't forget to ask them, and to put the answers to everything I figured out for future reference. It is now 29 tabs long. Some of those tabs are three pages. One of them is 230 pages. I'm not exaggerating, and I'm not embarrassed about it either.

Open Dental Works Really Well. It's Also a Lot.

Here's the thing about Open Dental... it works really well. Like, genuinely well. But there are a lot of buttons, seven modules, and frequent improvement updates to learn. If nobody ever explicitly walks you through what you're looking at, you can stare right at it and still not see it. You know that saying, "if that were a snake it would've bitten me"? That's Open Dental when you're self-taught.

How I Got Here

I came to SKF Practice Solutions as an Executive Assistant before I became a trainer. That meant I was reading call transcripts, writing recaps, sitting in on all the internal meetings, and answering the company phone line all before I ever sat down to formally learn the software myself.

What I've kept seeing, in almost every office we talk to and every database we look at, is a lot of similarities. Offices that had been using Open Dental for years, figuring it out on their own, doing their best... and quietly building problems that cost time and sanity (and money of course).

Why My Perspective Might Actually Help You

I'm a new trainer. I just learned Open Dental myself, still in the process of lots of learning and remembering, and I think that's a perspective that will actually be useful to you. Because it's only been a few months, and this stuff honestly just takes time. There's no shortcut.

My mentors, the people who've been doing this for years, they're brilliant at it, but they genuinely cannot remember what it was like to open this software for the first time and have absolutely no idea what they were looking at.

I want to reaffirm that if you're reading this right now, you are in exactly the right mindset and place for your life to begin getting easier. You just didn't get to dedicate 10,000 hours specifically to this software. And even if you have been in Open Dental for a while, doing your thing, figuring it out as you go... there's probably something in here you're going to read and think, "wait, that's a thing?"

That's my whole point.

What's Coming Next

Over the next few months I'm going to be writing about the stuff that I'm learning, the stuff I'm seeing in real offices, and the stuff that keeps coming up in conversations with dental teams. You are exactly where I was and still am sometimes during this journey. Some of it will be software specific. Some of it will just be about the learning curve of picking up a new system when you're already busy trying to do your actual job.

Final Thought

If you're brand new or have been using Open Dental for years and still feel like you're guessing sometimes... this is for you. You're not alone, and you're not stupid. You just didn't have time to work through a 230-page tab in an even bigger document to figure this out.

Follow along with my journey here and let's figure it out together.

👉SKF Practice Solutions