Microsoft Excel

Microsoft Excel

Microsoft Excel is no-free commercial spreadsheet designed by Microsoft, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. Excel along with PowerPoint, Word, and One Note form Microsoft Office. Using excel users can enter, edit and format data. They can create charts, diagrams, share their data and even solve mathematical functions. High school students are frequently asked to collect data and analyze it, especially in chemistry, physics and math. It can also be used for simple recording tasks. Excel provides a simple way to do this.

Graphing is taught throughout the academic curriculum and excel should not be used to eliminate the knowledge of how to make a graph, yet, once the students understand this, graphing becomes redundant. Excel is not hard to use, and can be used by people with moderate computer proficiency.  Moderate computer proficiency only in the sense that, tasks may require some addition research to learn how to use. For example, solving addition of data from different cells, one must type the function. (=STDEV(1,2). The new version has made it even easier to navigate with its new organization design. For example the tab labeled, insert has boxes inside, tables, illustrations, charts, links, and text.  If it is unclear how to perform a task in excel, the excel websites has “training videos” explaining exactly how do certain tasks. (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/excel-skills-builderlearn-how-to-create-spreadsheets-and-workbooks-use-formulas-and-perform-data-analysis-FX102592909.aspx)

This could be used in the classroom to show trends or relationships in the data that they have collected in classroom experiments. Solubility curves can be constructed for a mixture of methanol and cyclohexane by graphing the change in temperature vs. percent composition of the mixture. The curve can then be analyzed for conclusions. More simply students can use Excel to form a spreadsheet of data to keep track of who paid for prom tickets. Teachers can use it for simple tasks such as recording grades, and calculating averages instantly. As a chemist, I can honestly say I have used Excel to help formulate conclusions and analyze data for more than 90% of my labs. The graphs can provide a trend line with the corresponding equations and the R² values. It is extremely useful and I stress that Excels functions should be learned. It’s also worth learning because you can access your documents through Excels web applications. There is no need to deal with emailing files or remember your flash drive.