ClaremontCrizzle Education

Excel (the software)

The people who write and promote the software assume that we all want to add up last month's sales or work out a saleperson's commission or something equally irrelevant for a school situation. So we leave it alone, thinking it's not for us.

Actually, Excel is very useful in schools. It is good at mathematical calculations and drawing graphs. It's very useful for working out attendance figures, for example. Or keeping track of sports scores in a league. Or recording pupils grades, and showing changes over time.

It's also good at keeping track of the petty cash, or classteachers' budgets, or who has paid what towards an educational visit.

It can be a very powerful and complicated piece of software if you go beneath the surface and find the VBA programming language. So best avoid that. Similarly, avoid books with VBA in the title - they are much too advanced for most of us.

Jilly R