Microsoft Excel

Microsoft Excel (or commonly referred to as Excel) is another application I have been using for a good many years.  I have used it for personal budgeting, project work, performance tracking and record keeping.  The sort function and graphing options are excellent, as are great options for reports and presentation of statistics.

As part of my teaching experience, I find Excel an excellent tool to use for finance, production of financial statement templates, and for demonstration purposes. 

I have used Excel to create an exercise which involves learners having to create a six month Cash Budget for a business on the first sheet and working on the second sheet.  The task involves entering data in each row or column, using the formulae bar and also the auto-sum function.

The lesson involved discussing and demonstrating the calculations which need to be performed by using the Smartboard.  The learners were able to observe how the various cells formulae were constructed.  Learners were then allowed to perform the next stage and observed.

I also like the functionality of Excel in that I scrolled down row by row to explain but also to demonstrate by entering formulae such as =SUM(D10:D15) in the cell, observing learners following the instruction and then confirming the calculation. 

What is particularly useful is that you can same multiple copies as backup, email or upload the file for access by others.

In my volunteering role I use Excel to export attendance data to and then sort Attendance and Categories of Non Attendance (Duty Absence, Sick, Authorised Absence, Not recorded, and USD) and this report is submitted on a six week basis.

I do know from personal experience that those who do not like numbers do not like Excel…which is hardly surprising. However, once a few basic calculations are performed learners quickly appreciate the fact that calculations are performed very quickly, such as click and drag the cell formulae across a number of cells in the row and it automatically changes the cell reference to perform the calculation.

When I was teaching the budgeting lesson I was able to observe who was performing the task correctly and those who need some assistance. One key feature of Excel is that the learner gets immediate feedback on what they do.  If you enter the wrong value in a cell then it will have a knock on effect on the rest of the spreadsheet.

As part of my teaching, I will be using Excel as it is the most appropriate application to use for a numerical subject such as finance.