Just by a few blinks, the enjoyable week of working on multimedia presentation finally gone. Now, we have to change our mood to a more serious mode for we have three sets of assignments needed to be done by this week by the mean that before we sit for our final examination. I know it sounded pretty a lot and burdening but for me there is no such thing as so call “burden” when we are students who are in the journey of seeking and discovering knowledge.
As an opening for this week task, we were instructed to work on a one year personal financial management (income, expenses and balance) which was to be our Assignment 8a and upload it to Google Docs when completed. For this task, we were required to work upon it using Open Office Spreadsheet. Again, this was a new thing to me. As Open Office Impress, I have never used Open Office Spreadsheet before. So I guess, that was the challenge for teachers to keep on moving with technology advancement and always ready for new skills learning and exploring. First of all, before I started with the task, I should at least know what is a spreadsheet all about. From my reading, it has come to my knowledge that a spreadsheet is a computer application that simulates a paper accounting worksheet, (Wikipedia). In a spreadsheet application, each value sits in a cell. We can define what type of data is in each cell and how different cells depend on one another. The relationships between cells are called formulas and the names of the cells are called labels.
Next, lets move on to the task. The first step was to record the one year income and expense hence calculating the balance for each month in Open Office Spreadsheet. After that, what we all need to do was to link the formula between the sheets. To record the data might be sound a piece of cake but to link the formula between the sheets, that baffled my head a bit. I finished up the data record and then searched for how to link the formula between the sheets in Google search engine. I managed to find it in a blog so I started to make the link from sheet to sheet. It was not hard actually. Within 15 minutes, I succeeded to make the balance for each month to be able to be added to the balance for the consecutive months. With that, the objective for this assignment was accomplished!
But, that was simply not a sign for relaxing. Realizing that the examination was just a few days to come and I need to do more intensive revision, I have to deny my feeling to take a rest for a while. Without further ado, my partner and I moved on to Assignment 8b, the second assignment for Week 7a. For this assignment, we were still going to work on spreadsheet but for this time, we were to do it using Microsoft Excel. As what was instructed, we were to plan, create and edit a spreadsheet of students’ score and grade analysis. There were a number of functions and formulas that we have to utilize such as VLOOKUP, STDEV, COUNTIF and AVERAGE. These functions are useful fro it allows values of data to be read automatically from the given range. Knowing that nowadays teachers utilize those functions to record students’ examination score and grade, we are consider fortunate to be exposed early to those vital skills. Unlike teachers in schools, some of them are struggling to learn how to utilize those skills in order to catch up with the advance technology and education at the time they are likely to be called as veteran teachers. It sounds pitiful but that is the real life as a teacher. Education globalized from days to days, years to years thus the learning process of new things will never end. By using Microsoft Excel to record students’ score and grade, it makes teachers life easier. We don’t have to insert and calculate the scores manually as in Excel everything is easier and more accurate. We can even use graphs and charts to display the data analysis.
I have learnt so much valuable things from spreadsheet application. It was not something familiar to me for I didn’t take accounting during my secondary school and I personally seldom use it. So far as I remember, I learnt to do a spreadsheet using Microsoft Excel during my first semester of foundation which was about two years back. So now, I am refreshing back some of the skills that I have learnt before. I am very and very sure that those skills are very crucial by the time I am being placed in school later. Hence, learning it was not a waste of time but it was a precious experience as a student.
*Happy reading*
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