I know it’s fashionable to trash Microsoft at every turn and I have a lot of gripes with the company (Internet Explorer, anyone?), but with Office 2007, I really have a lot of nice things to say.
I’m not an Excel person. I know really very little about spreadsheets in general and tend to do anything like this in Word and just be done with it. I never took any business classes but thankfully, my wife was a business major and she can lend a hand whenever I do want to accomplish something in Excel. She helped me create a simple invoicing form in Excel which is very useful when billing clients, other than that- I know nothing.
So this year I decided to begin tracking my students in Excel instead of through Word. I feel more familiar with it after using the aformentioned billing spreadsheet for a year or so and can definitely see the advantages of tracking student grades in this format. I was about to start mucking around to create my own and thought to look first to see whether Microsoft had a template for this sort of thing.
Performing a quick search from Excel brought up a lot of different templating options, one of which was perfect for my needs. Another nice thing is that I didn’t even have to open a browser or anything to download it, search for it within my local file system, or anything like that. It was all automatic. I was able to customize easily and throw my students up into it with no problem whatsover. It’s a perfect solution, in this case.
The point being that I’m very pleased right now. Someone has saved me a lot of time and I’m grateful for that. I’m a firm believer in expressing appreciation where it is due- so…
Thank you, Microsoft.