MS Excel Lesson 6

Lesson plan – Microsoft Excel

Class 6

Objectives:

• Use Automatic Formatting
• Sort data

1)      To start with, we should close up the formatting portion of the class. For both of the learning objectives for this class, we can practice with Exercise 5 from yesterday, so ask the whole class to open that up.

2)      Highlight the table from Exercise 5. Explain that you’re going to use some predefined formatting, just like that of Word. Open Format>Automatic Formatting (Formatar>Formatação automática). It will open a dialogue box with a list of choices. Select one, click OK, and note how it automatically applies the formatting pattern on selected area. Have the class experiment by applying a couple different patterns.

3)      Now we will move beyond formatting and focus on manipulating data and doing calculations for the second half of the class. The first part is sorting data. Use this (for example) to find the highest score in a class, sort a list of names into alphabetical order, etc.

4)      First, you of course need to select the data to be sorted. However (and this is a big caveat), you must select ALL the data in the table, not just the column by which you want to sort. If you select just the one column, it will only sort that column, resulting in mismatched data in the rest of the table. Also, if there is a line with categories for each column, include that in the selection, as Excel will use it to label the columns. Use the table from Exercise 5 again. Once the selection is done, click Data>Sort (Dados>Ordenar) to open up the sort dialogue box. There, you must do two things:

a)      Choose the category by which you want to sort (use the dropdown menu)

b)      Choose the order: ascending or descending

5)      When the data is sorted, make sure to point out that all the data is still organized properly by line. To contrast, demonstrate what happens when you select just one line and sort it. Select just the row with student names and sort it. Now the students’ names are in alphabetical order, but they are no longer matched with their proper scores because their grades were not included in the sort. This can be a bit difficult to explain, so show it visually.

6)      Have the class practice by sorting a few times by various categories – student names, different classes.

7)      Hand out Exercise 6