Semester 2 | Week 2 Reflection

This week I revisited the Excel training. Although I have heard that Excel is very useful, I am not super familiar with the program, so I wanted to reacquaint myself with it, and play around to see if I could learn more. In returning to the program, I felt I had a better understanding of it than I did the first time. While I remember the original dataset feeling daunting, having completed it once before I felt confident to power through. That said, I feel the Excel tutorial could do a better job orienting new users and explaining the purpose of the example dataset. Moreover, the part of the tutorial that explains how to convert data into a graph feels very vague and does not feel directed enough. Perhaps the tutorial could direct learners to make a specific graph with specific data step by step, and then send them loose to further experiment? Furthermore, I do not think that the reflection questions do justice to the computational power of Excel. Perhaps the tutorial could dive further into the affordances of Excel? It would be especially helpful if the tutorial explained over Excel functions beyond sum and average and maybe provided a link to a resource on functions/equations that can be used. Nevertheless, the tutorial does provide a nice introduction into the bare bones of Excel, and the fact that it can be used to visualize data if one needs to do so.