Downloadable 
files
Unfortunately, Excel is not available
itself to download from the Internet. However you can download some
mathematical files that can be loaded into it. They are samples from "Maths
Through Spreadsheets", published by SPA. Go to
Resources for further information.
This is a developing area of MathsNet. You may have files yourself that
could be made available to other users. Make contact if you have.
For
MathsNet Excel files, move to the Download... page.
Internet assistance for
Microsoft make
freely available a "plug-in" to Excel which allows you to convert an Excel file
to an HTML page which is ready to be put on the Internet. Thus you can easily
make data files available to other users on the Net.
To download this, move
to the Download... page.
Internet sites aimed directly at the educational use of
Excel seem to be rare.
The School Mathematics Project (SMP)
provide Excel files containing full
National
Curriculum and GCSE references.
From
Deakin
University, Australia, you can download Excel 5 workbooks about Statistics
and about mathematics.
Discovering Important Statistical
Concepts Using Spreadsheets, or DISCUS, is a set of interactive spreadsheets,
produced by Coventry University, written in Microsoft Excel, designed for
teaching basic statistics concepts at sixth form and first year undergraduate
level. The materials are designed to be used off the shelf by students working
on their own, and little preparation by teaching staff is required. Freely
downloadable from
DISCUS.
Want to know how to create a "box
plot"?
At this Dunstable teacher's
site
you'll find access to Excel worksheets providing practise in many basic
mathematical skills. A teacher from Georgia, USA presents "To
Excel is Elementary".
From the National History Museum you can
download Excel format
dinosaur data files.
There must be more somewhere...
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Helpful hints
Excel toolbars
Excel now includes elaborate and customisable toolbars, for
example the "standard" toolbar shown here:
Some of the icons are useful
mathematically.
 is the "Autosum" icon, which enters the formula
"=sum()" to add up a range of cells.
 is the "FunctionWizard" icon, which
gives you access to all the functions available.
 is the "GraphWizard" icon, giving access to all
graph types available, as shown in this display:
Histograms
Just how to you get
Excel to produce a genuine histogram? You know, the one where the area
does represent the frequency?
Simplifying Excel for
younger users
There are as many as seven
versions of Excel available to schools now, all offering many sophisticated
options. These may be confusing to some users. Young students, attempting a
basic spreadsheet task in the classroom, may become lost in all the "pull-down"
menus and icons that they can freely click on. One way in which Excel can be
easily modified is to "freeze" the window and make all bar a few cells
"protected". See the following display.
All cells, apart from the blue ones, have been "locked" (see
Format... Cell protection) and the worksheet has been protected (see
Excel's own help file on how to do this). This means that the column and row
sizes cannot be altered, and all the student can do is enter something in the
blue cells; all others cannot be altered.
The above sample can be made more
pupil-friendly, by have the cell underneath each blue cell report if the above
answer is right or wrong. For example, in cell C6 put the formula:
=IF(C3+C4=C5,"Right",IF(C5="","","Wrong"))
This also checks if nothing is in
cell C5 and returns "nothing" in that case. |
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