Originally Posted by
Paint Horse
Excel is extremely simple. It is just a bunch of cells. In each cell you enter one of the following:
Nothing - Just leave it blank
A number
Text
A formula
Originally Posted by
Bobster
That sounds elementary to me, if you're just going to work with tables of numbers on the screen. The main thing then is to learn about formatting, basic formulas, and know the difference between absolute and relative references, which aren't too hard.
Go to the bookstore and flip through the pages of some books to see which have a style and level of difficulty that is appropriate for you.
Originally Posted by
planemechanic
Kinda like brain surgery:
cleaning
opening
cutting
closing
and sometimes you have to do it again.
Easy-peasey
I agree with all of you. It can be learnt by doing it. Simple things like designing a grade sheet that calculates class average for each test and weighted average over all tests for each student can be done after spending a few minutes to half an hour of self teaching. But then I learnt various versions of FORTRAN, TeX, BASIC, Pascal (Visual) and C, and some unix when I needed it, without ever taking a course. The problem I faced with learning excel is that it's designed for people who don't know conventional coding, and have little facility in mathematics. Some of the terms are not intuitive at all.
I used to be terrified of computer languages, because a bad introduction to computer programming in which the teacher spent so much time on binary numbers and translating binary to decimal and back that it turned me off. Computer was supposed to make my work easier?
I entered graduate school with zero literacy in computer languages. I ended up taking a graduate level course in Structural Vibration in which the final exam was a project that required writing a FORTRAN programme. I was taking 4 graduate courses and was teaching four classes as a TA. I got hold of a FORTRAN77 book but just didn't have enough time during the last week that I decided to ask for an Incomplete. I told the professor, who was also the Chairman of the Deptt of Mechanical engineering that I just didn't have enough time to learn enough FORTRAN to complete the project and that I could work over Christmas break and get it done by the first week of January. He said as a matter of principle he does not give Incomplete and that he would calculate my grade with a zero for the programming part. He looked at my grades and my analysis and said don't bother. You already have an A even with a zero in the project.
I could not have finished my thesis without FORTRAN and TeX in the days when you hired a typist to type your thesis. Word processing was done by programmes such NROFF and TROFF or SCRIBE, modem speeds were 110 bps-1200 bps. I used Tex to write my thesis.
Anyone used TeX?