PE3_Google Docs-spreadsheet

Hi there Finger tappers,

Next in the Google Docs set we have the spreadsheet. I have to admit to not ever having used spreadsheet software before (my wife puts our budget together on it so I know what it looks like but I’ve never had cause to learn it before today) so I’m going to use a video I found in Woopid to help me.

( http://www.woopid.com/video/2210/Create-a-Spreadsheet-in-Google )

Okay. I’ve watched the video, taken notes, so let’s get dirty! Because I’ve already played with Google Docs (document and spreadsheet) before it’s easy to open a new spreadsheet and, no surprise, it looks very similar to Excel. Well, it’s got lots of boxes anyway.

At this point I had better work out what I want in the spreadsheet. Something simple, like an attendance/hot and cold lunch/lunch money sheet. I know that most schools now have software to handle this but for something like a summer school or a smaller ad hoc facility, having a document like this that could be shared with someone at the front office and someone in the kitchen might be handy.

I’ve entered some headings, some names and some data. On the video it shows how to change numbers into money and apply formulas to the information so I’m going to add up the money total.

Now I want to know how many hot lunches there are. I looked in the list of formulas to see which one seemed appropriate and I tried the COUNT and then COUNTIF formulas but they didn’t work. (garbage in, garbage out)

So it looks like the lunch lady is going to have to sort by alphabet and count herself until I can work this out. I'll keep you posted. That said, I tried to sort as it says in the video but it looks like they might have changed the software. To sort you now have to pass the cursor over the column header and a little down arrow tab appears which, once clicked, gives you options for sorting and other things.

One last thing I noticed that I want to have a look at is the form button in the menu bar. Hey that’s cool. It creates an online form from the data headings in the spreadsheet. 

I think that is going to be a great segue into PE4. Forms

Next time

Peter