Microsoft Excel

Excel is a mystery to me.  I've never really seen a need for me to use it, as I associate it with number crunching and calculation and other things that I didn't need to do very often.  I did see it as a way to organize contacts and text (such as in the mail merge function), but that was just putting things into a grid.  In the undergraduate class I mentioned last week, I used Excel more than in the past. 

The class was built on developing our own business, products, and sales and then tracking the imaginary data we came up with.  My business was a pet shop that sold dinosaurs exclusively, using technology that was present in Jurassic Park (hey, the professor said we could do whatever we wanted as long as it was appropriate).  In the end this made the project more difficult for me, as my imaginary products were in the thousands of dollars for one unit (it was a dinosaur egg after all), making my calculations all the more difficult to do.

This project taught me that Excel was more than just a fancy calculator due to the number of formulas and procedures that can be included into a spreadsheet.  As a requirement for the project I had to develop charts, graphs, and "future" business projections based on the data I had created.  All that being done and said, I STILL didn't have any use for Excel besides a fancy calculator to crunch some numbers and then make a pie chart off of those numbers.  It can serve as a useful tool in a classroom for student expectations (at one point last year I was tempted to make a pie chart of assignments completed versus assignments incomplete for a particular student in order to show him how little homework he had done, but my better judgement decided against it), but again, besides numbers Excel meant nothing to me.

The crossword assignment this week adjusted my thoughts somewhat.  I am starting to see Excel as less of a fancy calculator or just as a simple grid and more so as a grid with hundreds of little boxes that I can manipulate to perform whichever task I can come up with.  It could be a color by number to develop math facts or a word search generator.  I'm still extremely unfamiliar with all of the potential functions of the program (and honestly, a bit intimidated too, look at everything in the "formulas" ribbon!), but I'm hooping this course and the development of this webquest can help me get a better understanding.