Excel Practice 6

This is a little different. This is using a timeline template in Excel Online. I had no idea there was such a thing as "Excel online". Neat! :)

I used dates and events from a Wikipedia timeline of ancient history.

Excel Practice 5

This is also an Excel practice exercise from Professor Houston. The object in this exercise is to make a spreadsheet that displays social science data. The learning points are converting the data into several charts that you then move to new sheets. The first time I tried to do this exercise, I was able to make the first chart, but then somehow I lost the sheet with the original spreadsheet on it! So I had to make it again. 

The first image is the initial spreadsheet. The following images are the charts derived from it:

Excel Practice 4

This practice, from Professor Houston, is a mortgage worksheet. I completed it successfully, however, I don't understand how the PPMT and IPMT functions work--they have commas in them, instead of mathematical notation, which doesn't seem to make sense to me. Obviously, I have a lot more to learn! Nonetheless, so far, it's been very fun!

Excel Practice 3

This is a practice checkbook exercise for Excel from Professor Houston. It has some funny humor thrown in about some imaginary criminal activity. 

This exercise uses two formulas. The formula in the G cell in the very first line (line 4) is simply the sum of the debit cell and the credit cell in that line. However, all the G cells below that are the sum of the new line's debit and credit cells and the previous line's G cell (the previous balance). This is common sense, of course, but it's worth articulating. 

This exercise also teaches two kinds of automatic numbers that are available with Excel. In the date column, there are a variety of date formats that you can choose from (month/day/year or year/month/day, etc.). In the numbers column, there are a variety of money formats you can choose from. 

Excel Document Practice 2

This is a Microsoft Excel exercise that was posted on the web. It's from Professor David Houston at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. It says it was last revised in 1999, so it's quite old. Nevertheless, it's very useful, and it has helped me learn some basic things about Excel. 

This exercise requires you to make a spreadsheet with grade data for a university course. 

It shows you three different methods of averaging data in cells:

• (a1+b1+c1)/3
• sum(a1:c1)/3
• average(a1:c1)

I suppose the last is the easiest, but it's nice to know the others. 

The exercise also introduces the idea of the absolute reference cell. When you copy a formula from one row to the next, for example, the copy of the formula alters automatically to refer to the corresponding cells in the new row. However, if the formula contains an absolute reference, then when the formula is copied, it does not automatically adjust--the formula will still point to the same cell it did in the previous row. The way to make an absolute reference is by putting the letter (in the cell reference) in dollar signs. Like this: $A$1.  

$A$1 is an absolute reference to cell A1, and no matter where a formula is copied to, it will always point back to A1. 

Excel: Important Things to Know

In this video, information technology expert Ilan Patao explains important things to know how to do on Microsoft Excel. 

The topics covered include:

1. How to populate columns, either with identical data or with consecutive data (e.g., 1 1 1 1 1, or 1 2 3 4 5, etc.)

2. How to sort data in columns. For example, there might be a numbered list that is out of order, but there is a method for restoring it to numerical order. He also teaches how to sort by cell color. 

3. Removing duplicates from groups of data. For example, removing repeat numbers from a column of numbers.

4. Basic formatting of text in cells--that is to say, the font type, size, color, and whether it will be in bold, italics, or underlined.

5. Conditional formatting, which is the ability to select out certain data based on properties that distinguish it from other data, such as being greater or lesser than a certain value, or containing a particular element. 

6. The variety of built-in formulas.

7. Concatenating--that is to say, combining data from one group of cells with data in another group of cells. 

8. How to move data delimited by a comma to separate columns. For example, if you have data in a cell that looks like this, "1, 2, 3"--how to move that to three separate columns (adjacent cells) such that 1 is in a separate cell, 2 is in a separate cell, and 3 is in a separate cell. 

9. The "if" formula. 

Excel Document Practice 1

This is my first real attempt at a producing a document with Microsoft Excel. It's okay, I guess, for a first time, but I feel like I cheated a little bit using the text box--I had wanted to combine the cells and line up the text and justify it within the larger space created by combining the cells. I also don't know how to align the images. They are aligned by hand. This document also doesn't contain any formulas (i.e., showing how the data combines to some result). I also see now that the caption under the coconut palm image is not centered under the image.