On October 4, 2021, DCI Intern Danielle Workman presented specific functions on Google Sheets to the team. DCIers learned the different vocabulary of Google Sheets, basic functions, and one advanced function called "sort." DCI now knows how to apply these concepts as high schoolers on our budget, volunteer hours, task list, and more. All of these principles apply to any spreadsheet application such as Microsoft Excel. Although Google Sheets is considered one of the more unused Google applications, it has a lot of purposes and really cool functions. Many people use Google Sheets because of the tables that it comes with. DCI uses these different rows and columns to organize our task list. However, there are many more functions of Google Sheets that allow for a wide variety of uses. For example, one can use it to make shopping lists, budgetary sheets, trackers of all kinds, or graphs of certain data. Danielle uses google sheets a lot to track her volunteer hours from multiple organizations and budgets for projects she is doing, such as her Gold Award. Some super common and simple to use functions are SUM, AVERAGE, COUNT, MAX, and MIN. These are all pretty self explanatory SUM adds up a certain range of cells, AVERAGE finds the average, COUNT counts the values, MAX finds the maximum of a certain range/data set and MIN does the opposite. Almost all basic arithmetic functions (like subtraction, multiplication, and division) and more can be done on spreadsheet applications. Spend some time looking through the functions bar or look up other functions on Google to see what’s possible! Most simple functions follow the same format: equals sign, function name, and the range in which you want the function to apply to inside parentheses. For example, we have this SUM function. We have an equals sign, the name of the function (SUM), and the range inside the parentheses. Ranges are demonstrated by the top number a colon and then the bottom number. Also, the range is typically displayed in orange in the function bar unless it is a more complicated function. You can manually write in the range or you can drag your cursor across the range you want. I will show both ways later on. The same concepts I talked about apply to most simple functions. However, there are many small mistakes you can do that will cause the function to fail. Always use an equals sign before writing a function. Otherwise, the sheet will just display as text inside the cell instead of applying as a function. Also if you forget the beginning or ending parenthese, the function will fail. Be sure to note that this format is for simpler functions. More advanced functions will require more information inside the parentheses. I can show you this on the next slide. The SORT function is one of the more advanced function but Danielle thought it was worth sharing because she believes it could be of use to DCI. DCI uses spreadsheets to organize their Task List and we all do our part to try and maintain the alphabetical and chronological order it has. We all just write our next task we completed under one of our own to make sure our names are all in order but the SORT function makes it super easy to organize a data set.
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February 2024
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