Week 11: Muddy Microsoft Access

Microsoft Access is the one Microsoft Office application that I’ve had very little experience using. Basically it’s a lot like Microsoft Excel in the sense that is used to store large amounts of data. In other words, it is a database. Access is more convenient than Excel when it comes to organizing a colossal amount of data into related groups called fields.

All data within Access is stored in tables. Each column within a table contains a specific field of unique information. The way a user interacts with the data in Access is via a query. While using a query, a user can perform four basic operations on the data: create, retrieve, update, or delete. This really is where Access has the advantage over other databases, like Excel, because here you can sort data in relational fields for easier data updating or data retrieval. After data is entered into the database it can be manipulated into reports for use in presentations.

Week 10: Clear Communications

In week 10 of Business Computing the primary topic was networks, and the main purpose of creating networks is to make communications more practical and productive. Essentially a communication is merely the transfer of data among two or more devices.

There are three primary kinds of devices that communicate via a network: workstations, nodes, and servers. The server is a computer whose sole purpose is to control and provide services to nodes and workstations connected to its network. The workstations are merely client computers that are connected to the network, and nodes are all other devices connected to the network.

To create a network there has to be a media through which data can be transferred between the server and its nodes. There are two general kinds of media used here: physical and wireless. The physical media is a copper or fiber-optic wire, and the wireless media is radio waves or infrared waves.

The bandwidth of the network is the amount of data that can be transmitted through the media in a given amount of time. To optimize the speed of the network you want to increase bandwidth and decrease latency, which is the time delay due to the conversion between analog and digital data. There is narrow band and broadband, and of course to optimize the speed of the network broadband is more efficient.

Excel Project

For this project we were obviously working with excel. We were given a worksheet of data on a new exercise regime created by a large fitness center, and now the owner of the center would like us to format the worksheet to her liking.

Having grown up using a computer my whole life, I didn’t really learn anything new in step one of the project. Most of step one was just tweaking the format of the worksheet a bit for convenience sake, and working with excel functions. The rest of step one was just changing the printing format in “print preview” so the printouts would be more practical. I will have to say though that I learned something new during step two of the project. This is the first time I have ever used pivot tables. The reason I have probably never worked with pivot tables is because I have never dealt with worksheets large enough to need a pivot table for data filtering. Now that I have used pivot tables I can see they can be extremely beneficial in the business field when dealing with very large worksheets.

Week 9: Clear IF Functions

Functions are one of the most essential applications of the excel spreadsheet. Without functions many uses of excel would be much more tedious. Usually functions utilize mathematical calculations to achieve some numerical value as a result. One type of excel function that is not usually used to derive a numerical value as a result is the “IF” function.

The IF function is basically a statement that derives true or false as a result. An IF function asks a question of the data, and there is only a set amount of definitive results. For example, suppose you are a basketball recruiter for a college. You have scouted over 100 players. Since you have so many players to choose from you would like to focus only on the players who are above 6 feet tall so you can get rid of the less significant shorter players. You have the heights of all the players on an excel spreadsheet (in cells A1:A125). To categorize these players as “tall” or “short” use the function =IF(A1>6,”tall”,”short”). After this information is calculated in cell B1, copy and paste the formula to cell B2:B125.

Again, the IF function is perfect if you have data in which you wish to sort into different categories.