S3_Spreadsheets

Definition/Theory (Class Summary)
**What you can do with a spreadsheet**

While tracking the income and expenditure of a large company may be out of your league, spreadsheets can be put to a myriad different uses.

You can use a spreadsheet to budget your personal finances or keep track of your investments. You can follow loan repayments or compare the benefits of different mortgages. You can analyse the weather patterns in your area, perform classroom or meeting room timetabling, assess the performance of students in a class, create invoices, and much, much more.

Not only are spreadsheets great for tracking your current financial position, they also excel at "what if?" scenarios. What will my bottom line look like if I take an extended holiday this year? How soon can I pay off that loan if I pay fortnightly instead of monthly?

The great thing for beginners is that most spreadsheet programs come with a swag of pre-designed 'solutions' which have all the basic layouts and formulae worked out for you. All you need to do is customise them (if need be) and enter your own data. ([])

So you can prepare a cash flow analysis for Monitoring and predicting likely income and expenditure to keep in track with financial affairs of your office or home.

Similarly you may easily predict changes in values such as effects of a price change on costs, discounts and profit. A fixed table can be prepared to show these changes but more significantly the figures could be changed from time to time to reflect new situations with same formulas in place. Perhaps the most frequent use of spreadsheets is in financial and cost accounting. Many businesses use spreadsheets to calculate balance sheets, profit and loss accounts and cash books. You can perform bank reconciliation, calculate jobs costs, taxes, schedule payments, forecast profits and control stocks. In all these tasks the spreadsheet proves a very important tool in simplifying the computation process and production of the results. In data collection and analysis, spreadsheets can be used to record, present and analyses the results of polls, surveys and research. With new gadgets such as handheld, laptops and computerized. Mobile phones, you can do all that while on the road and getting the results instantly. For teachers and students, in addition to the foregoing, spreadsheets can be used in class work and research activities. In mathematics and the sciences, spreadsheets could be used to convert temperature figures whether in Celsius or far hermetic, metric to imperial measurements, pounds to kilos, exchange rates among a host of other measurements. You can also calculate trigonometric and logarithmic functions, standard deviations and critical path analysis. In addition, the computations may be presented in table on graphic form. There are buttons you can click to make your data appear in table format or in the form of graphs and charts. These enhance the presentability and understanding of the data. ([|How To Make Good Use of Spreadsheets])

Who uses spreadsheets
(Wiki Answers; [])

Accountants need to keep track of all of the money coming into the business and all of the payments going out. They need to be able to calculate profits and forecast how well they think the business will do during the next year. They also need to calculate the wages of all the staff each month.

Teachers can use spreadsheets to keep track of marks given for homework and recording exam results and also for registers.

Engineers need to perform thousands of calculations when designing bridges, buildings, aeroplanes, cars etc. They need to make sure that bridges will be able to support themselves and will not collapse under the weight of traffic or the force of strong winds. They need to work out how deep the foundations of a house need to be in order to support the walls and roof. They need to make sure that the aerodynamics of a plane will enable it to take off and fly.

Sales people use spreadsheets to keep track of the items they sell, the value of the items, the profit made on each item and more importantly, the commission they have earned!

Scientists need to be able to keep track of their results from experiments. They use spreadsheets to help them to analyse what happened with the experiment and also to predict what might happen if they were to change one variable.

Supermarkets use spreadsheets to keep track of finances i.e. sales, losses and money spent. They also use spreadsheets to work out queuing times and what are the best number of checkouts to have open at any one time during the day.

Market researchers collect data from shoppers about their spending habits and their awareness of different brands. All of this data has to be collated and analysed in order to provide the company with a detailed report of what customers think about their products.

Mention 3 other possible uses of spreadsheets that weren't mentioned in the reading.

Which are the advantages of using spreadsheets for keeping track of finances.

Which are the disadvantages of using spreadsheets for keeping track of finances.

For what could you use spreadsheets in your daily life (inside and outside school).

News Articles
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