Software tools exist for organizing data (spreadsheet and database) and presenting information (documents). Microsoft Office must be purchased; both LibreOffice and OpenOffice are free and run on many platforms; Google Documents provides office applications that can be shared.
This assignment will give you practice in using a spreadsheet to organize data. You may use either Microsoft Office (available in all computer labs on campus), Google Documents or any open-source software you have on your personal computer.
Excel (Microsoft) and Calc (LibreOffice and OpenOffice) and (Google) Spreadsheet work pretty much the same. This means if you can use one of them it's fairly easy to figure out how to use the others. And, when all else fails, there's Google.
I've created an Excel
spreadsheet.
It contains the nutritional composition
of some foods (taken from Laurel's Kitchen (1986)).
Download this file and open with a spreadsheet application.
The first row of any spreadsheet is typically used for "column headers". A column header defines what type of data is stored in that column.
Each row of a spreadsheet should be thought of as a "record". It represents a single item in the spreadsheet that has several attributes: those data items that are defined by the column headers. The first column should be reserved to contain a unique value. In the case of our nutrition spreadsheet, the name of each food item is unique. There are no duplicate values in the first column.
When possible, ALWAYS arrange data in your spreadsheet in this way.
This spreadsheet is sorted on column A (by food name). This can be useful when you want to look up a particular food.
Rows, columns and individual cells can all be formatted. In Excel, click the Format Button. Notice how you can resize rows and columns, hide and show columns, and format the contents of cells.
There is a column with the heading "calories, calculated". Let's write a formula to determine how closely the the listed calories correspond to the calories we calculate.
There are approximately 4
calories per gram of carbohydrate and per gram of protein;
9 calgories per gram of fat.
The calculated calories for each food is 4*carbs+4*protein+9*fat.
How do we know which operations are done first? Multiplication or division? We hope that the spreadsheet performs multiplication before addition, but to be absolutely safe, we can always use parentheses!
Here's a challenge for you! Instead of putting the 4 for carbs and protein, and 9 for fat in the formula, define these values using 6 cells: use three for titles, and the other 3 for the values. Putting them in rows underneath the nutritional data.
Show me your updated spreadsheet. Save your updated spreadsheet AND save it as a pdf file. To get your pdf file to look "good",
Upload the excel and pdf files to moxie into your isc110 folder.
Edit your index.html file (in your isc110 folder). Write a paragraph that describes the assignment AND what you did with the nutrition spreadsheet. Place this paragraph either before or after the hyperlinks. Make it visually pleasing.
It should look like this:
<li>Nutrition Spreadsheet Assignment:</li> <p>Make sure to write a paragraph about this assignment</p> <ol> <li><a href="nutrition.xlsx"> (Excel file) </a></li> <li><a href="nutrition.pdf"> (pdf file) </a></li> </ol>
How do you create a pdf file from an Excel spreadsheet file? Make sure that the entire spreadsheet fits on onepage. (There is a way to accomplish this in Excel.)
MAKE SURE your links work AND that the files look ok!!