Learn Atomically

*Note: This is a blog entry about another one of our classes I missed while I was on away for a religious holiday. My knowledge may not be as detailed as it should be. Please excuse that.

While I was away we were told to go to atomic learning, a site that Mr.Case has got access to for a few weeks, that has tutorials about using different functions in various applications. So Mr.Case gave us a few about Excel to look at.

Sorting Data: One of the tutorials went over how you can use the List function in Excel to sort Data. You go to Data>List>Create List. For this function it is not necessary to select ALL your data, instead just select one cell and Excel will locate the rest of the data for you (you can still customize the data selection after Excel selects for you). The list allows you to sort by a specific header in your data, or in ascending/descending order, or in alphabetical order.

Comparing Excel Workbooks: To compare two different excel books at once in the same window we can use Excel's Compare Side By Side function. To use this first open the excel workbooks you'd like to compare then go to the menu bar window>Compare side by side. It will ask you which two workbooks you want to compare if more than two are open at once. This is great for when you need to compare and see if two workbooks have the same data.

Until next time,

--Amna

PodLaws - Where the fun ends!

With our first Podcasts completed, we were told about copyright laws and how our 1st Podcasts were basically illegal =O! It was a long, and very detailed, 31 page PDF file. I read and read, and tried to come up with solutions to work around things that I'm not allowed to use.

Even though it seems really hard to work with the law, I've realized that they're there for a reason and that there are simple ways of working with the legal material.

1) All you need to do is to ASK!: If you don't own it, you just need to contact the person who does own it and ask if it would be alright to be used in your podcast.

2) Open Source Files: There are lots of Open Source files on the internet that are totally legal for you to use change and re-distribute.

3) Make it yourself!: If you don't think the other options are working for you, start from scratch and make all you'll need by yourself! If you do this you'll have the right to what you're using. No questions or complications.

--Amna

Report Cards: Released

With report cards out on the 1st of December, we're going to use what we've learned and some new information about Excel to create a layout for our marks over the next three terms. This will help us see where we're at right now in terms of reaching our goals, and how we'll reach them in time.

Thus far in our journey towards conquering Excel we've always been given the question, we just had to find the answers. However for this assignment WE had to create the questions. Remembering that excel will give the answers as long as you can come up with the correct questions to ask.

So to start off we made a column with our Subjects, and Marks in the First term. Then we went on and decided our goals for our Final mark (Term1, 2, 3 average) in a separate column. To see what we had to get in the second and third term to achieve our goal as the Final mark we had to create a formula in both the columns, Term 2 and 3.

This was TRICKY STUFF! In the end though after moving numbers around and doing the 'dummy' test, I came up with good formulas for both columns.

Term 2: Take your goal, and subtract the 1st term mark from it. It should look something like this (E4 - B2). Remember though that there are three terms, so divide your term 1 marks by 3.
=(E4-(B2/3). This should give you the percent remaining to make your goal, we have two more terms left to follow through with that percent so we'll divide the formula so far by 2 =((E4-(B2/3))/2). Now we have the percent remaining in both terms, however we need to convert this into a mark for the second term so we'll just multiply the whole formula by 3 cancelling out the percentage and giving us our 2nd term mark. =((C4-(B2/3))/2)*3

Term 3: This time we'll take our 2nd term marks and subtract them from our goal. We'll follow exactly the same steps done in term two except we'll replace term 1's marks with term 2.
It should end up looking like this: =((E4-(C2/3))/2)*3

Dummy Column: use 100 as the goal and the first term mark, if your formula gets 100 in the other two terms your formula works!

There's still a lot to be learned! Ganbatte Ne~?

--Amna