NCT Week 11

The Lecture
This weeks lecture was about previous forms of computing/communication from era's as far back as the caveman days. Also talk about greek gods and what not, talking about humans and their contribution to our technolgies now. Also discussed was a tremendous amount of ethics that should be present in today's society, but in someways are not. Also a bit of wisdom on writing, and interesting stories, and the people who are most likely to have more interesting stories to tell/who have a good concept of reality and the earth.

The Tutorial
In Microsoft Excel today, we had to make a document, and learn basic functions like hiding, and unhiding of rows, making graphs, formulas, and adding borders to cells. All of the things that it said we had to do, I already knew how to do, except for the macro button’s thing, but I had completed tasks similar to it before. I found the instructions in the course reader to be somewhat vague, and hence found them hard to follow. So to figure out the macro buttons I had to find a round about way of making it happen, using prior knowledge of making new menu buttons, and by clicking on many things till I found what I was looking for. Also I find that macros are generally an ineffective way of getting around excel, and in my opinion, 9 times out of 10, there will be a better way to do something other then using macros. All of the things in this exercise that we were asked to do, I knew were possible in a way, but I personally had never thought about using my knowledge in the ways portrayed in the reader. Benefits of having this skills would have to be for people who plan on working in fields that require lots of use of Microsoft excel, i.e. data entry. Other benefits would be for people who need to do up graphs and things a fair bit, this would make that process a hell of a lot easier. Likewise people who feel the need to keep a personal budget would also find these skills useful. However, from my previous experience of Microsoft Excel in high school, I feel that the task in the reader could have been a bit more complicated and challenging, as in high school, a highish kind of level of excel skill is taught… In grade 8. In case you actually do read these blog entry’s at all, it’s probably a worthwhile note, that if you haven’t noticed by now, the last 50-100 words or so have infact had little to do with the task at hand, and are more or less just making up words. However if in fact you don’t read this blog entry’s then that’s just good for me.