1B40 Computing: Excel Week 1

The Information Systems Division (ISD) of UCL produce two documents on Excel. It is believed that most of the material described in the first booklet, Excel 2002 (XP) Part 1; Document 353, and a fair bit of the second, Excel 2002 (XP) Part 2; Document 354, would have been covered in IT courses at school or college. The two booklets may be viewed via the links above. However do NOT print them out as each is about 60 pages long and will waste your printing allowance. Either document may be obtained (free of charge) from the ISD helpdesk in the basement of the Lewis's building which is situated at the corner of Gower Place and Gower Street. If having looked through the first booklet you feel that it is very unfamiliar, don't panic. Tell the demonstrators when you go to the Excel sessions and email Dr Dave Tovee at d.tovee@ucl.ac.uk with a brief note saying what parts you have and have not done before. (If you wish to try the tasks and exercises in the booklets Excel 2002 (XP) Part 1 and Excel 2002 (XP) Part 2, they are available here from a local version of the 'ISD training' page.)
(Note: The two booklets referred to above are being replaced at the start of the 2004/5 session by several booklets: "Getting Started with Excel", "Getting Started with Excel - Exercises", "Introduction to Excel Formulae and Functions", "Introduction to Excel Formulae and Functions - Exercises", "Using Excel as a Simple Database", "Excel as a Simple Database - Exercises" and "Excel Charts". The exercises and references to page numbers relate to the older booklets linked above.)

Your first Excel session relates to the slightly more advanced features and topics covered in ISD's second booklet and which is more relevant to your use of Excel in practical work, i.e. production of graphs (charts). The exercises for you to try out your knowledge of Excel are modified versions of, or selected from, those given in the ISD booklets. Reference is made to the page numbers of these booklets where help or explanation is given. Help and guidance can also be obtained from the demonstrators - or maybe your neighbour!

Open the file "Excel-P&A-tasks" to start the first week's exercises.

You may find that your browser attempts to open the spreadsheets or Word files directly in your browser window, rather than downloading them or calling up the appropriate handling application. This may produce something that looks like rubbish. However, don't panic - simply use "Save As" to save the files to disk. Make sure you save them with a ".xls" or ".doc" file extension as appropriate; you can then easily open them in Excel or Word.

This week's lecture provided an introduction to the course and discussed experimental errors, random and systematic errors, precision and accuracy.
Next week's lecture will discuss the normal distribution, means, standard deviations and the error on the mean.