Lesson 8

Part III (Introduction to Spreadsheet, continued)

In this part, you will learn an important feature of spreadsheets; a feature that makes spreadsheets very powerful calculation tools. This great feature involves cell referencing and formulas.

1. Experimenting with Formulas

2. Entering Formulas (formulas MUST begin with an equal sign (=))

How many cats do students in classes 1 to 4 have?

Try this: Click on B12, delete the = sign and press EXE (Spreadsheet now thinks B12 contains a text entry). Ok, now please put the = sign back!

3. Another Way to Enter Formulas

How many cats do students in classes 1 to 4 have? We will look at another way to do this. If we had 400 classes instead of 4 to sum, we would not want to type in all the cells.

4. Summing a Block of Cells

How many animals (cat and dogs) are there in all the classes?

Formulas are very useful in spreadsheets. When we combine them with cell references, they become very powerful. In Lesson 13 we will learn more about cell referencing. For now, try the following and think about is what happening:

Part III


Practice Exercises

  1. Open the eActivity application and reopen L8_PartIII_a. If you need to get back to eActivity, you can click Resize and then click inside eActivity. Or, you can click the upper to close Spreadsheet window.
  2. Once you reopened L8_PartIII_a, expand the Spreadsheet strip and click Resize.
  3. In Statistics, we use the word “mode” to mean “most often”. The mode of a list of numbers is the number/s that occur the most in the list.
  4. Click in cell A11 and type in Mode and make it bold.
  5. Click in cell B11 and input =mode(B2:B8) [Hint: You can use the Calc menu’s mode command or type it in and select the cell block.]
  6. Get a screen capture and paste it into your Lesson 8 document (under a title of PART III).
  7. In cell C11, find the mode for the number of dogs in classes 1 to 7. [Hint: You can drag cell B11 to cell C11.]
  8. Get a screen capture. Add two blank spaces following the first screen capture and then paste this one.
  9. Save your work as an eActivity named L8_PartIII_a_your initials here.
  10. Ok, now let’s have some fun (if you are not already). To begin, open the eActivity named L8_PartIII_b.
  11. Please read the instructions inside the eActivity. After expanding the spreadsheet strip, click Resize. Your goal is to rearrange the numbers in the block B4 to D6, using each number from 1 to 9 only once so that the outer sums all equal the same value.
  12. Once you have all the outer sums equal (all the non-bold numbers), get a screen capture. Add two blank spaces following the second screen capture and then paste this one.
  13. Save your work as an eActivity named L8_PartIII_b_your initials here.

Part IV

Reflection Exercises

You have just completed the eighth lesson in ClassPad 101. Remember that you can use what you just learned in Excel. Please take a few moments to copy and paste the following three questions at the end of your Lesson 8 document and answer them.

  1. Approximately how long did it take you to complete this lesson?
  2. Which activity did you enjoy the most?
  3. Did you find any part of this activity difficult to follow? If so, which part? Also, how did you overcome the difficulty?

Assessment 8: Introduction to Spreadsheet