Excel's Potential for Teachers

  • Thread starter Thread starter That's Confidential
  • Start date Start date
T

That's Confidential

I am a novice to Excel (as many of you will probably have already guessed)
however I am beginning to realise the full value of Excel and how useful it
can prove to be.

My (open) question is what is the true potential of Excel for teachers and
other academic staff? If I were to use it to input attendance records,
grading etc, would Excel be able to do anything with this info? Also, what I
am thinking of is having kind of 5 standard paragraphs for reports. Then I
would like to input grades for students throughout the year and then at the
end of the year, I would like Excel to work out the average of these grades
and then convert this number into its matching paragraph and then create a
report in MS Word. What is the possibility of this?

Would like to hear off anyone who has used Excel to help them monitor
performance, attendance etc etc..... Also, if anyone has any templates which
may be of use to me, would appreciate it if you could maybe post them here
or let me know and i'll give you my email address!

Sorry if this question sounds unanswerable, but just curious!

Thanks
 
That's Confidential said:
My (open) question is what is the true potential of Excel for teachers and
other academic staff? If I were to use it to input attendance records,
grading etc, would Excel be able to do anything with this info?
Click to expand...

Excel is very good and very easy for recording tabular information, and so
can record this very easily. As with all things, whether it is the best
product for doing this will depend upon the amount of information, the
complexity of the data, the sort of analysios to be performed on the data
etc. A database with a query tool might be better, but starting with Excel
and prototyping your ideas, developing upon them, adding to them, and so on
is a greate starter. Excel makes it easy to change, and is very friendly to
use.
Also, what I
am thinking of is having kind of 5 standard paragraphs for reports. Then I
would like to input grades for students throughout the year and then at the
end of the year, I would like Excel to work out the average of these
Click to expand...
grades

This is a typical Excel function , and this sort of analysis is one if it's
strengths.
and then convert this number into its matching paragraph and then create a
report in MS Word. What is the possibility of this?
Click to expand...

This is more advanced. It is easy to cut and paste into Word manually, but
if you want it automated, it canb be done but it needs VBA and it is much
more complex. But you could always design a report in Excel, and print from
there, with headings, siummary data, charts, all of the bells and whistles
you could possibly want.
Would like to hear off anyone who has used Excel to help them monitor
performance, attendance etc etc..... Also, if anyone has any templates which
may be of use to me, would appreciate it if you could maybe post them here
or let me know and i'll give you my email address!
Click to expand...

I am sure there will be tons of examples available for you. Again, it will
all depend upon your requirements, usually everyone has different
requirements, but I would suggest you start small and build up. For instance
take the attendance record. Do some design, how will the data be organised
(all classes together, separated, ditto years, etc.), and then work out how
you want to capture the data (a form for entering each person/day
individually, or a grid where many can be entered together, and then build a
starter book and experiment. And post back when you get the inevitable
blocks.

I have built an leave application in Excel for business areas that would
have similar principles to you application. Initially it was just a
spreadsheet where days absent were recorded, and I had people as rows, days
of month as columns, and months of year as worksheets. This grew bit by bit
until it is now a fully-fledged application, with VBA by the bucket-load
backing it all up. But it started small and grew. You can do the same thing.

Hope this helps

Bob
 
Hi

Bob Phillips said:
This is more advanced. It is easy to cut and paste into Word manually, but
if you want it automated, it canb be done but it needs VBA and it is much
more complex. But you could always design a report in Excel, and print from
there, with headings, siummary data, charts, all of the bells and whistles
you could possibly want.
Click to expand...

You can use Word's Mail Merge feature, to create letters/reports or mails,
based on Excel table. With a little work you can have a quite flexible tool
which creates personalized reports, having all Word's features to use, and
equipped with buildt-in tool for filtering records. You can create reports
as Word documents, started from new page for every row in source table, or
send them directly to printer, or you can decide to generate mail letters,
which are sendt automatically. And all this without VBA at all.
 
Back
Top