Excel Project

I completed the Excel project today with little problems. The centering and bold instructions were very straightforward and simple. The first challenge that I came to was selecting the areas to paste the relative formulae to. When using the shift/control.down arrow keyboard shortcut, the entire column was selected, well paste the data. I used the mouse to scroll down while holding shift, selecting the first and last cells in the column with no issues.

The printing preferences in Excel 2010 are slightly different than in 2007. I feel it was even easier to do these steps with my new desktop than with my laptop running the older version. The headers and footer and footers were very intuitive and I did not need to use the help functions.

Before this class I had no experience with Pivot Tables. The first one gave me a little trouble, but once I realized I was not giving the program enough information to make the table, it went just fine. I really like this feature and can see using it very soon.

Here is the screenshot of the AvgIncrease Pivot Table:

Week 5: Clear on Excel, some formulas are tricky though.

Glad to get to some meat in ISM. Excel is one program I would like to be more proficient with. I have a new boss at work and he realizes the value of Excel's abilities. My old boss didn't use (or expect me to use) Excel at all. So I need to get better quick.

When generating pricing documents for our funeral home we like to group individual prices into popular packages to make the information more easily understood by our clients. My last boss generated these package prices on paper with a calculator. We are finding discrepancies in the price lists generated before the change in management. My Excel project for the week was using the data from our general price list to make tables for each package. I plan to make a more in depth model using historical data of our package mix to project revenue with changes in individual prices.

While I am pretty good at making simple tables and models in Excel, I would really like to be better with large amounts of data. This weeks lectures introduced me to some shortcuts that are much appreciated, especially the keyboard shortcuts. Some of the navigation is slightly different in Excel 2010. It is fairly intuitive, but it took me a few seconds longer to print the column titles on every page. In 2010 you click on the square to the right of the field and enter the cell range in the separate field that opens. The syntax for the "If" function is tricky.

This is a fun class. I must be a nerd.

Week Four: Clear on Software Analysis, Licensing and Life cycle

This week's material seems pretty straight forward. I really enjoy moments like this in the Online business program. After taking Managerial Economics with Dr. Dewey and Finance with Dr. Tapley in back to back semesters, I'm pretty fried. Also the direct, no-nonsense quiz questions are greatly appreciated.

The licensing of software was the most interesting to me. I recently bought a new desktop and bought MS Office 10 even though I had a Office 2007 disk from my laptop. I wasn't sure if the EULA for an employee home use program would allow it to be installed on two machines. Even though I'm small potatoes, better to be safe than sorry. The importance of software licensing was also emphasized in the Entrepreneurship class I completed in the spring. Proper licensing of common application software is often overlooked when starting a small business.

I was able to relate some of the material from the lectures to my work experience. In addition to the horizontal software that most companies use such as MS office, funeral homes also use a program to manage client data, generate contracts, and print necessary forms such as death certificates. The program we use at North Brevard Funeral Home, CFSS is developed by our corporation. It is not only industry specific, but company specific, linking our finances, inventory, and even our websites to make our jobs easier.

In other news, today has been a great Saturday. The wife, kids and I went fishing this morning and I hope I fixed an oil leak in the MG.

Clear: Operating Systems Week 3

So I've watched the last 5 lectures on operating systems and the material was much less familiar than the hardware lectures, but stilll pretty straight forward. Many of the subjects such as the BIOS or Basic Input Output System were familiar from dealing with the IT helpdesk at work. We do take for granted just about everything that happens when we press the power button.

I alway wondered where Kernel had come from. It was not explained in that great of detail in the lectures. I am familiar with the term from seeing it on my computers in the performance tab of the task manager. I did a search and found this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel_(computing)

I was really disappointed in my quiz grade. It seemed to me that about half of the material on the quiz came from the lectures, and there was no reading assignments or other material that I could find. I have swung wide before, I just hope I'm not missing something. Update: Professor Olson corrected the quiz! I'm glad I wasn't going crazy.

Clear: Hardware, Muddy: Second Life

After watching the first three videos for weeks two and three, I am more excited about this class. I have done some simple component swaps, but never built my own computer, and usually rely on the advise of my brother for advise on hardware and software. The lectures are very easy to watch and interesting. I did learn that I probably did not need a quad core processor. Now I going to purposefully make sure I'm doing more than one thing at a time, just so I didn't waste my money.

Even though I am considered "the computer guy" in my office, I really am not deserving of the title. I usually use this method:

http://xkcd.com/627/

At work, reluctance to use computers is a source of frustration for me at work. My co-workers at times are reluctant to give up with the old ways of the funeral industry and let computers share some of the most simple tasks that take up much of our time and energy. Some of our state and local forms and documents are still completed on a typewriter. Yes, a typewriter.

O.K., so one of the extra credit opportunities is to create a profile on second life. I am all set up...and officially creeped out. I can see that it can be a way to increase communication skills in electronic platforms, but I just don't understand the attraction of doing this for fun. I had a hard time figuring out how to update my appearance and I can't really figure out what exactly I'm supposed to do, other than talk to weirdos. I hope I can find the recommended sites and get through the instructions for the extra 20 points. The problem with Second Life is that every minute you spend in it, you lose a minute in First Life. First Life rocks, by the way.