This week's theme is Excel. For the most part, excel and I have had a love-hate relationship.
it can do so many things... but it's a pain in the neck to learn.
I actually took a computer fundamentals course a year ago where we beat the basics of excel to death. But i also found out about a lot of other cool tricks on the way.
You know how everyone's go-to presentation shower is powerpoint? well, i learned that excel can do a lot of that stuff too. and it's actually pretty cool.
So you know how you can have multiple sheets within one document? Well, there's a way you can hyperlink the cells to go back and forth between the different sheets. and you can insert pictures and backgrounds into the excel page.
So I ended up making this one excel document that I titled "the boy store".
(I'm warning you now: when I made this document, I had nothing better to do with my life than create this document.)
What I ended up doing was photoshopping pictures of action figures onto empty store shelves. the action figures were meant to symbolize the perfect man, as if you could shop for them. So for each action figure, I put a brief description of the man in the cell above and then linked it to a following worksheet. For example, there was a Buzz Lightyear doll that linked to Will Smith and a random action figure that linked to Matt Damon. And then on that sheet, I had a link that brought you back to the original page.
Ideas like this are PERFECT for elementary classrooms! You can have the "homepage" have different problems that link to the sheets with the solutions for example. there are so many possibilities with excel. And albeit it's tedious and time consuming, in the end, it's worth it.
I had absolutely no idea about these links that you can do in an Excel document to switch from sheet to sheet. Really that is awesome. I will try using that with a workbook one time when I am working on that. How do you do these links? You sound like a pro with them so I was hoping for some feedback on that. I really have never learned about them and I would find it very useful. Thanks!
ReplyDeleteif you do insert -> hyperlink, you have an option to link to a website, email, or document. on a mac at least (it should be the same for PC), you look for the anchor option and press locate to select the sheet that you want. and it really doesn't matter to which cell you link it to. hope that helps!
ReplyDeleteThat's so cool - I didn't know it could do that either!! Thanks for the extra explanation as well. I'm going to try this myself. I agree with you that this extra trick could be super useful for teachers. Who knew??
ReplyDeleteI'm confused, what would you use the hyperlink to switch between sheets for in a cell? isn't it easier to just click the tab at the bottom for the different sheets? What would be an example of using this method? I'm curious.
ReplyDeletewell, for my example, I have 20 different sheets to go through. So rather than click through to find the answer, I hyperlinked it so that, for example, cell A1 on Sheet 1 brought you to cell A1 on sheet 12. So let's say you're creating an interactive jeopardy game in your class, sheet 1 would be your number sheet, then the "vocab words for $400", the link would bring you to the sheet where the question was, which could have a link to the sheet with the answer, which would have a link back to sheet 1. for a jeopardy game, there would be wayyyyyy too many sheets to click through.
ReplyDelete