I'm actually very nervous about using Excel. The few times I have used it, I felt entirely lost and ended up accidentally deleting all of the data at least three times, and doing formulas manually which made the program feel useless. Because of this, I decided I wanted a bit of a head-start on the class, and took a Lynda.com tutorial. The tutorial was around an hour and a half long, and began with a basic discussion of what Excel is and why people use it. The first "chapter" described how to input data, how to use and create formulas, and over all how to access the functionality of the website. The second "chapter" discussed the different ways you can format the sheets in order to make them more neat and professional looking. The last "chapter," the shortest, talked about how to share the sheets, both by using the cloud and by emailing.
While some of the formatting tips were a bit obvious, I genuinely didn't know that Excel could do all of the things it can in terms of formulas, recommending charts, recognizing patterns, etc. As a history major I don't have many projects in which I enter data, but I could definitely see this being used by teachers to calculate grades.
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