IT for Education

We covered a bit about formulas and conditional formatting today. I'm not going to talk about that. Instead I'll tell you about the most ridiculous Excel project I've ever worked on. It's one of the reasons why I tend to adopt a 'less is more' mantra. It's also why I know a lot of this stuff in the first place. Many years ago, before working in higher education had ever occurred to me as a possibility, I did some temping work at British Rail to help pay for uni. I was based in an office above a terminus station with just two other people - the boss, who despite carrying himself with an extremely strict, professional manner nevertheless had an obvious screaming fabulousness bubbling away just under the surface, kept under a tight wrap presumably until the weekends hit, and his shy and efficient PA who was very meticulous about the tea area.

Over the last few posts I've discussed a couple of the most important MS Office applications from an education perspective. PowerPoint and Word are two dominant weapons in my preppin' holster and I rely on them daily. Of course Office is much more than two pieces of software, so I thought I'd go through some of them briefly here. Excel When it comes to spreadsheets, Excel is the undisputed market leader. It's got the users of course ( Office 2010 broke the billion user mark  some time ago), but it's also known as a powerhouse of software used by nearly every market sector. That includes a whole lot of using it for the wrong purpose (which seems to be a trend with the whole suite), most classically as a database when Access is readily available (I'm guilty of this myself). I use Excel to track students' attendance and performance, budget for orders and other administrative tasks. I've never used it in teaching and unless I start teaching accounta...