Excel Project

Although I was somewhat familiar with Excel before beginning this project, I found it to be a huge learning experience for me. I frequently create spreadsheets at my office, however, I rarely use formulas and I have never created a pivot table. Becoming familiar with the use of these two items alone will greatly increase my productivity at work, and I will be able to do advanced calculations that would have taken me forever to do individually with a calculator.

 I also enjoyed listening to the lectures, and thought the Excel Scavenger Hunt was a great idea to help me focus on the critical aspects of the lectures and to create a good reference sheet to aid in the completion of my project.

Besides the above mentioned calculations that I will definitely take advantage of, another aspect that will contribute to my ease of use was the "Workbook Structure" lecture. The keyboard shortcuts and keystrokes that move you quickly and with ease from one area of your spreadsheet to another will be particularly useful when dealing with very large sheets of data.

Even though I found myself frustrated and hung up on a couple of the steps in the project, it was overall an enjoyable assignment, and possibly one of the most useful sections that we will study. I definitely learned the value of the F1 (help) key!

Hopefully I didn't miss any steps, and my calculations are correct. Please see below the required "screen capture" of my "Avgincrease" pivot table.

Tutorial 1: How To Add RAM To Your Desktop Computer

While watching the first few class videos I learned so much about the workings of a computer and how it all comes together. I found RAM of special interest because I have a very sluggish computer system which appears to become more so as time goes on. I assumed the only solution would be to soon put out big bucks for an entire new computer system. But as I researched more about RAM, I found that this is a fairly simple, and in comparison, inexpensive way to upgrade and possibly make my system run faster.

When I accessed the Indiana University Knowledge Base website I learned the following about RAM. These memory chips provide space for your computer to read and write data to be accessed by the central processing unit (CPU). Memory stored in RAM can be accessed much more rapidly than when the computer has to go to the hard drive to find it and sort it out. The programs you are working on at the time are brought from the hard drive to the RAM chips. As you open more applications or programs the RAM memory will become full and the computer will then have to go to the hard drive to access the program you are requesting. This slows your system down. So, obviously, the more RAM you have available, the faster your computer should run.

Also of interest, I learned that data stored in RAM stays there only as long as your computer is running. As soon as you turn the computer off, the data stored in RAM disappears. When your computer reboots, it accesses the read only memory (ROM) chips and loads the more recent information back into your RAM.

Please watch this brief video to learn how simple it is to add RAM to your desk top computer.

Avatar (surely worth more than 10 points)

Well this was quite a challenge for a technologically challenged woman! Creating an avatar was no issue whatsoever. However, the fun began when I had to figure out how to get her from where she was created to my blog! I began on "TizMe" and created a really cute me. So I saved her to my documents which it saved in jpeg format. This would not allow me to simply copy and paste so I decided to try another site. I saw several blogs that stated "Face Your Manga" was really simple, so I figured that was definitely my speed. I created another, not so cute me, on Face My Manga, and at the end it says she will be emailed to you. After waiting an hour, and checking my email every 5 minutes during that hour, and still no avatar, I went back to TizMe. The cute me, was still patiently waiting for me to figure this whole thing out. Finally, there it was, the symbol which represented "Blogger" and then I knew I was home free. And now you have the rest of the story and my avatar!