Prof. Taylor helping students excel with Excel

Professor Taylor's CD ROM assists students to quickly become confident with Excel

2000-04-24 - Management Science professor Hamish Taylor understands that many students need a leg up on mastering critical spreadsheet skills to get the most from their course work.

To help students learn the important features of Excel spreadsheets for business decision making, Taylor has developed a CD ROM with "movie modules", which are real time dynamic screen images showing Excel operations in detail accompanied by an explanatory "voice-over" by Prof. Taylor. The lessons start from basic operations, and cover five important topic areas:

1.Spreadsheet basics: spreadsheet structure, formulae, and data entry
2.Creating and editing graphs
3.Spreadsheet built-in functions
4.Using Data Tables, the "Solver", and "Goal Seek" to solve a pricing problem
5.Statistical functions, and useful tips.

The tutorial's self-paced approach (with fast-forward and jump-ahead capabilities) allows students to pause a movie at any time, create tutorial examples in their own spreadsheets, and then continue with the movie lesson.

Initially developed to assist Queen's Executive MBA students in mastering spreadsheet fundamentals, the tutorials have been subsequently expanded to meet the needs of undergraduate Commerce and MBA for Science & Technology students as well. Professor Taylor's CD ROM assists students to quickly become confident with Excel, and encourages an appreciation of how the full power of spreadsheets can be exploited for in-depth problem analysis.

For more information about the Excel tutorial, please contact Hamish Taylor at 613.533.2335, or email: htaylor@business.queensu.ca