I use Microsoft Excel for loads of things, from trying to keep track of
my money to Connect 4. Here's
a few examples of spreadsheets I've made for different purposes.
Feel free to muck about
with them, but if you want to republish them (for some reason), please
acknowledge my authorship, such as it is.
You will need to enable macros for most of the
spreadsheets (see note below). Large
files may have been zipped to squeeze them through the phone
line. To decompress after
downloading you'll need Winzip, available free from their site: www.winzip.com
Note:
most of the spreadsheets I make nowadays are for teaching maths (which,
as a maths teacher, is what I do). If you're interested in the
full list of my teaching resources (including PowerPoint presentations,
worksheets, etc as well as interactive spreadsheets), see my Teaching Resources pages: Teaching Resources
Since most of these
files
contain
macros, you will probably need to download them to your hard disk
(Right-click>Save Target As) and then enable macros in Excel
before
opening them.
For those of you who play the guitar, this Chord
Transposer
may be handy, especially for beginners - it allows you to transpose a bunch of chords all
together at the click of a button. If you do play guitar, you
may
also be interested in My
Music page, where I have
uploaded chords for some songs I
like.
I made a trial version of my dad's Spreadsheets4Farmers
website. I
assured him it was easy to produce in excel, and made this to prove
it. He decided to have it made
professionally :) Website
trial
Connect
4
The famous four-in-a-row game in computer format.
Fairly simple to understand the basic programming behind
it, but look at the next bit if you want to make your own
(recommended).
How
to connect 4
Zipped (622kb), this takes you through, step by step, how to make your
own Connect 4 game. You
may spend more time making it than you do playing it, but it'll also be
more fun! Loads of
screen shots, hence zipped.
Five
A neat little game I discovered as a Java applet somewhere, and decided
I could do just as well in excel.
A board 5 by 5 square, each square being white. On a double
click, the
selected square will change to black, but so will each vertically and
horizontally adjacent square. Try
to change all the squares black. Tricky.
Error
I made this to illustrate the random nature of a repeated error.
If you have to cut a whole
bunch of pieces of wood the same length, but do it by using number 1 to
measure number 2, number 2 to measure number 3, etc.
The small error incurred in the first step may be
increased or reduced by the uncertainty inherent in the second step,
and so on. This
shows a randomly created graph you can re-create by recalculating (F9)
to see what could happen to the length of up to a thousand pieces of
wood of a given ideal length.
Memory
Cards
Try this out. If I
remember correctly, it produces a set number of cards chosen from a
normal pack of 52. Then
you hide them and try to type them out correctly.
It then marks you on how sucessful you've been.
Dynamic
list validation
This is basically to show how you can use a formula in the Data
Validation>List source data section to allow the list to change
size as you add or remove items. For
instance, you could specify a maximum range of A1:A100, and then if you
filled up the first 9 cells, the range would alter (by using the
INDIRECT function and some other bits and bobs) to A1:A9. Vowels
This takes a string of text, and removes all the vowels from it.
See if you can still
recognise what's being said. Also
has an extra bit that puts all vowels in lower case and all consonants
in upper case. If
you want that kind of thing doing to text for a leaflet or something,
this is by far the quickest way.
Letter
change
Disgustingly over-engineered, but it does the job.
It wroks on the rntlecey derosceivd inrsitteneg fact that
we can slitl usntrdaned a wrod rrgdleesas of the order of its leretts,
pioerdvd the fsirt and lsat are in the poeprr pacle.
A superb way of out-manoevring computers and government
screening while still keeping text humanly readable!
Someone ought to add the code to email programs. "Send" or "Send
with
human-friendly encryption"...
Fibonacci
Poetry - If you fancy
butchering your favourite poems or slices of prose, copy the text into
this, and choose a sequence to use. It will return a passage
which uses only the prime numbered words (ie the 2nd, 3rd, 5th, 7th,
11th and so on), or those which occur in the Fibonacci sequence, and so
on.
Numberplate - An invaluable resource for
anyone who has ever played the numberplate game (or indeed, across the
pond, the 'license plate game'). The object is to find a word in
which the three last letters of the vehicle registration appear, in
order (although not necessarily concurrently). This nifty
spreadsheet (in Excel 2007 form, I'm afraid - I needed the extra rows)
uses the official Scrabble wordlist to find every possible word for a
given combination.
2-letter
Word List - The full list of valid two letter words for Scrabble,
in an easy-to-use table form. Includes a type-to-check function,
which handily also give you the definition of the word. If
there's one thing more annoying than being able to say "Of course it's
a real word", it's having a come-back to the response "Alright, so what
does it mean, then?"
Questionnaire
Example of an interactive questionnaire using only
hyperlinks.
Arithmetic
Produces random one or two digit sums and checks your answers.
Countries
Some statistics on, I think, all the sovereign states of the world.
Choose
function
Allows you to choose what you do to the data from a drop down
list. A bit limited, but has
potential.
Daylight
Saving Time
A trial to decide how much time we actually save, and how much we would
save with double DST. Formulae
A bunch of useful formulae bunged into a simple interface for solving
quadratic and kinematic equations.
Unit
converter
Handy conversions of distance and time.
Of
course, GoogleCalculator has since made this somewhat obsolete for
those of you with the internet (which, judging by the fact that you're
reading this on a website, is probably most of you)
LCD
display
Conditional formatting produces an LCD-like number display.
Clock
A digital clock based on the LCD concept above.
Abacus
Conditional formatting and a few interesting formulas provide a
computerised abacus.
Os
and Xs
Noughts and Crosses. Does
what it says on the tin.
Mastermind
Quite a cool version of the classic MasterMind.
You play against the computer (though it isn't up to
guessing your combinations, I'm afraid...)
Text
for number
Gives a written number for a digit, eg three hundred and sixty four
point five six for 364.56.
Random
comment
Produces a truly random comment with a simple macro.
Traffic
lights
Random application of macros and conditional formatting.
BMI calculator - I recently
made this as a break
from revision - don't set too much store by this number, even assuming
I've got the calculations right - it's not a particularly good guide
for individual health targets or anything.
Prime Factorisation - One for the
mathematicians, this Excel 2007 creation will find the prime
factorisation of two numbers (up to the seemingly random limit of
15,838) and display it in the Venn diagram notation used to identify
the highest common factor and lowest common multiple of a pair of
numbers.
Turing Test - My own version of a robot that
is designed to pass the Turing test, through sheer cussedness.
The test, for those who don't know, requires an ordinary person
to be unable to distinguish between a human holding a conversation via
a remote computer link and a robot designed to converse with humans.
My version gets around the difficulty of understanding and
answering questions by being frustratingly uncommunicative.
Poker Hand - Despite the time it took
and the huge confusion of formulae behind the scenes, the function
performed by this spreadsheet is very simple - you tell it what cards
are on the table and in your hand in Texas Hold 'Em, and it will tell
you what the best 5-card hand you can make from them is, and indicate
for you where it appears on the scale of good hands (also with a handy
percentage indicator telling you how high up the rankings of all
possible 5-card hands it fits).
Ozgrid - This
website was very useful for me when learning what I could do with
Excel, especially the forum
