SEC | S20W1 | Spreadsheet Essential For Beginners (Spreadsheet Overview, Spreadsheet Interface & Basic Formulas)

This is my homework post for Professor @simonnwigwe’s Season 20 Week 1 teaching class assignment, Spreadsheet Essential For Beginners.

Note :

• I performed this task on Windows 10 PC, Microsoft Excel 2021, and Google Chrome.

Task 1 - Explain your understanding of the Spreadsheet, listing its features, its purposes, and an example image that follows your explanation.

Spreadsheet is a very useful application especially for office work needs. There seems to be no office that does not use this type of application because it will help them in many ways, including making financial reports and progress achieved.

Its capabilities include managing complex data (numeric or text) in tables stored in cells. The functions it has make work very easy, saving a lot of time. The most popular spreadsheet application is probably Excel released by Microsoft Corporation. Besides that, we can also mention Google Sheets which as the name implies is a product of Google, LLC. Another one that is no less popular and open-source based is LibreOffice Calc.

^{The Logos of 3 famous Spreadsheet apps.
Sources: MS Excel | Google Sheets | LibreOffice Calc}

There are tons of features in Spreadsheet that help it handle complex tasks, including:

• Columns, Rows, Cells. The simplest feature is probably the visual feature of rows, columns and cells. Rows and columns make a Spreadsheet interface look like a table. Rows are horizontally aligned and named with numbers while columns are vertically aligned and named with letters, and the cross between rows and columns is called a cell and named with a combination of letters and numbers.
  ^{Column E
  Row 8
  Cell C4}
• Formulas. Spreadsheet is equipped with lots of formulas that can be used for various needs, from simple ones such as the one used to find the number of cells that have contents in a certain cell range, to complex ones such as to find how many product A sold in outlet 10 in the last month based on the data in a table, for example. The following image gives an example of another simple formula, which is the formula to calculate the distance between two dates in term of days.
  
• Diagrams and Graphs. Work reports would be very boring if they only contained numbers and letters. To bring more value to these reports, Spreadsheets have the ability to convert data into diagrams and graphs. Here is an image that shows a simple graph of 6 students' math scores.
  ^{Simple Chart}
• Sorting. There are times when data needs to be sorted from the lowest value to the highest value or vice versa, either numerically or alphabetically. With Spreadsheet this can be done easily. The following image shows the state of 6 students' math score data before and after sorting from highest to lowest. Sorting like this is useful in ranking, for example related to work performance, progress, and so on.
  

And there are many more Spreadsheet features that help work.

Task 2 - Based on the basic Formulas given in this lecture, use the data below to calculate the SUM Function and the AVERAGE Function of the class. Show clear working as to how you arrive at your answers.

	A	B	C
1	Name	Maths Score
2	ruthjoe	60
3	bossj23	65
4	sahmie	59
5	okere-blessing	79

Sum and Average are two of the important and popular functions in spreadsheet applications.

SUM

The SUM function, which is useful for finding the sum of numbers contained in the cells in question, can be done in three ways:

• activate the sum formula [sum=(] followed by the selection of cells that contain the data that needs to be summed. This is used in a condition where the cells that have the data you want to sum are in random positions or have gaps (separated by cells that have unwanted data).
• activate the sum formula [sum=(] followed by selecting the cell range. This method is used when the cells that have data are in a range that is not separated by cells that have unwanted data.
• combination of the two methods above, if the case has such complexity.

In the case example given by Professor Simonnwigwe, of course it makes more sense if I use the second method, which is utilizing the cell range in the formula, this method is simpler. Although the first method as I mentioned above can also be used, but this method is more time-saving and “smarter”. What you need to do is just a few easy steps:

• First, determine the cell where the SUM result will be placed, here I use cell B6.
  
• Second, activate the SUM function by typing =sum(.
  
• Third, select the first cell and while pressing the [Shift] key on the keyboard (Windows) press the arrow on the keybord in the direction where the next cells are (in my case, upwards), after all the desired cells are selected, end the function with a closing parenthesis ) and press the [Enter] button. Such a method is suitable in cases when the cells have a short range (maybe up to 10 cells, but this is subjective). For data located in cells that have a long range, for example 20 cells (for me this is already a long range), then I think it is more effective to select the first cell and then by still pressing [Shift] select the last cell where the desired data is located, then press the [Enter] button.
  

This operation produces the value 263. Here is a video that shows how I do this.