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.