Week 7, saw our Monday 6pm Tutorial lead through spreadsheets – specifically Microsoft Excel by Jenna, Katerine and Kim.

Prior to this I have had past experience with excel, entering data, using formulas and making graphs. I have used it for assignments, catagorise my CD collection and keep track of my income.

However I did manage to learn from this presentation especially as it was performed on a more recent version of Excel than I was previously used to!

I also discovered other programs such as Calc in Open Office, Numbers (Apple), Corel Quattro Pro, Lotus 1-2-3, Edit Grid and Google Docs.

By far, I felt most excited to create graphs/charts using the data but found this is where I struggled most. I needed to have more of an awareness of what ‘data series’ I had selected and how this would translate in my graph. I had a picture in my mind of how the graph should turn out and ended up altering the way I had entered my data to ensure the graph was communicating the correct idea.

For our reasearch project in Reflective Education last year, I used excel to store and manipulate our data findings.

reflective-for-hands-on-data

Please have a look through our PowerPoint Presentation at how I used this to explain our findings.

Useful resource I found in my further exploraiton of this topic:

NCES KIDS ZONE