Spreadsheets

I got my spreadsheet start in Quatro pro. Now days I now use Excel quite allot. It was an easy transition.

What is cool about spreadsheet programs like these, is what you can do with them.

Most people use them to create stuff for finances like budgets, schedules, Payrolls etc. Excel is really good at those sorts of things. After all that is what it was designed for.

But it's the other things it can be used for that I find interesting. For instance I created a spreadsheet which every morning at Work I enter the time I arrived and then at the end of the day I enter the time I left so that I can calculate my hours every week.

When I first started at my current job I created a spreadsheet to keep track of where things are and what and when to do it. Basically I used it as brain storage. Pretty soon it became a piece of a model for organization for the team. It's strange.

When I was at school I had finished several programs and wanted to see how close I was to achieving any certificates or degrees. So I took the Syllabus and duplicated it in Excel then plugged in some formulas so I could set some check marks which would then highlight certain cells if the achievement was accomplished.

While at it I discovered that the Syllabus hadn't been calculated correctly. So I asked my Instructor about it and when he looked at it he asked if I could finish it so he could use it. He also said it was worth extra credit. So I finished it, and in the process helped fix the credit distribution.

Believe it or not Excel is also pretty good at geometry too. Using the right kind of chart it is simple to create graphs, but by indicating x and y the graph can go back on it's self. Then by doing this it is relatively simple to create a graph of a circle or square or whatever.

Back when I was small and One of my Uncles was going to school to be a Math Teacher he showed me this really cool Quatro pro graph he had done. It produced a Spirograph where you could change certain cells and get really neat designs.

Whenever I have something I want to formulate like how to write a program which draws an ellipse I'm likely to draft it out in Excel.

The more I use spreadsheets the more I think of the possibilities of what they can be used for.

I bet one day someone will figure out how to write a game of Asteroids all using Excel cell formulas. It would be difficult for sure. But it would sure be cool. even though it would be equal to using a screwdriver or a wrench as a hammer.