TASKS

Task 1 (Individual Task)

You have decided to use MS Excel to create a worksheet to organize your monthly expenses and calculate the balance for you. You can use fictious data for this assignment!

Your worksheet should include the following data:

1. A title such as "My Monthly Expenses"
2. Expenses: At least four items (e.g. rent, utilities, food, parking, payroll, phone bill, etc.) during a period of four months
3. Income: At least two sources (e.g. Loan, Family Support, Student Work, Other, etc.) During a period of four months
4. Note: The data related to currency should have the dollar sign, with 2 decimal places

Follow the instructions below and complete a personal worksheet for the expenses you spent in the past 4 months.

Step 1. Set up the table. Plan how you would like the table to look like. The following is an example.

Step 2. Input raw data

Step 3. Compute the data

Compute the total

• Compute the total expense for each of the months
• Compute the total expense for each of the items across the four months
• Compute the total income for each of the months
• Compute the total income for each of the source across the four months

Compute the average

• Compute the average for each of the items across the four months
• Compute the average income for different sources
• Compute the average monthly income

Compute the balance

between the income and the expense for each of the months between the total income and the total expense for the four months and the difference between the total income and the total expense during the four months.

Multiply the average to double check the average operation. In another word, see if the result of the multiplication matches the total.

Step 4. Create graphics.

• Create a column chart on monthly expenses and total summary of the expenses in the worksheet (not in a different sheet!!), including a chart title, axes titles, and a legend. Legend must have specific labels instead of "Series 1, Series 2...and Series 5".
• Create a second graphic (of your chosen style) on the monthly balance and the total balance during the past four months.

Step 5. Header/footer.

Add a predefined header to the worksheet that displays your name, email address, Lab #2, Section (02), and the page number to the footer.

Step 6. Print it out and turn in.

Make sure that you preview the worksheet before printing it out. Everything must fit into the same page. You may have more than 1 page, but make sure that your table is not cut into two pieces. So you need to consider either shrinking to fit a page or choose a landscape view for printing.

Due Date: Task #1 is due by the end of the lab.

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Task 2 (Team Work).

What is data, information, and knowledge? This is an open-ended problem that requires your team to get the data, input them inot the spreadsheet, make interpretation of the data, make it into useful information and search for underlying implication of the information.

Scenario: Search for statistics on a basketball team or a football team (either college team or professional team, for example, it can be Penn State's basketball team). You can get the information from the nba.com, espn.com or Penn State's web site. Your team's task is to track the performance of a player or a team in comparison with other players or teams on three of the following:

• field goal (%): (shots made/shots attempted) during a certain period of time
• turnover-to-assist ratio (%) (turnover/assists)
• Rebounds ratio (offensive/defensive)
• Total rebounds (offensive + defensive)
• Fouls committed/steals committed
• Free throws attempted/free throws made
• three-point attempted/three-point made
• minutes played per game/points scored

If you don't like this scenario, you can make up your own scenario, but you need to talk to me and see if it is appropriate.

Procedures for Task 2:

1. Define the research question. What is the question that your team would like to investigate? For example:
   What are the strengths of the Penn State's basketball team? What are the weak areas of the team? What needs to be improved? These questions, of course, can be further broken down into sub-questions, such as the specific performance in shots made, free throws, and points scored per game.
2. Search for raw data from the internet resources
3. Set up a table and input the raw data
4. Summarize the data by calculation across the rows and columns.
5. Create charts to represent the data
6. Interpret the trends of a player or a team
7. Write a report, including the following:
   • your research questions
   • the summary of the data (you can do so by copying the data or table from the spreadsheet and paste it in the word document)
   • the graphics (you can do so by copying the graphics from the spreadsheet and paste it in the word document)
   • your interpretation of the data and your analysis of the trends
   • argument to support your analysis.
8. Print the report and turn it in (one report per team). Make sure that all the members names and email address are included in the report.

Due Date: Task #2 is also due by the end of the lab. If you need more time to work on this assignment, we will negotiate. However, it will not be later than 4:30 pm Friday (Jan. 19). So I encourage you to take full advantage of the lab hours and complete the work there.

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OBJECTIVES

After this lab, you will be able to

• understand the major concepts and functions of a spreadsheet.
• use Excel to create a spreadsheet.
• use Excel to organize, manipulate, and graph numeric data.
• interprete data created by Excel
• apply spreadsheet to solve a real-life problem.
• understand the concepts of data, information and knowledge

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Resources

1. Required text: Chap.1 on "data, information, and knowledge". Computers, Communications, and Information (7th Ed.). Hutchinson & Sawyer (2000).
2. Penn State CAC Web-Based Tutorial (WBT) on Excel, and select a level that meets your need.
3. Any appropriate textbook on Microsoft Office 2000, such as MS Office 2000 for Dummies (available from the bookstore)

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EVALUATION

This lab is worth 1 point, 0.5 for Task #1 (individual task) and 0.5 for Task #2 (team work).

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LAB GRADE. Lab 2 grade will be posted here by Wednesday next week.

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