A brief history of everything!

We've been learning a lot of stuff over the past 4 weeks! I'd really like everyone to take a little while to reflect on what you've learned, how confident you are feeling, whether you feel you need to spend some more time on certain aspects before moving on etc. Here's a summary of the past 4 weeks:

Week 1
In our first week, we recapped our Excel skills with an activity about Nepean/Penrith District Soccor club. This gave us a chance to re-familiarise ourselves with formulas in Excel, creating Charts in Excel, formatting numbers etc. etc. If you have finished this since week 1, make sure you let me know as I've only got 5 people as having competed this activity.

Week 2
In week 2 we recorded our first Macro by following the first part of the the tutorial Excel VBA: No Experience necessary -Lesson 1. This tutorial introduces the VBA editor in Excel, recording macros, and then goes on quite quickly to introduce Loops (something we only began looking at last week). It would be worthwhile going back over this now as we've learned enough to get up to example 3 in the tutorial.

We then took a break from VBA and looked at data validation in Excel. This enabled us to help our users enter valid information with Excel's built in Data Validation tools. To get an overview of what we did, check out the introduction to data validation from Microsoft and then go over your own StudentRecords spreadsheet.

Some of us also got to know the basics of computer programming through AJ's Turtle Graphics application. We saw how we can write computer instructions to draw a square on the screen, and then extended that to draw other shapes.

Week 3
We quickly recapped a few things from the previous week (recording another macro, doing some more data validation) and then picked up where we left off with our introduction to computer programming. This time we saw how powerful repitition can be by turning our simple squares into beautiful flowers like the one shown here.

We then got to know the most useful function ever written - the MsgBox function. while also seeing how every VBA procedure that we write needs to start and end with some special bits, like this:
Sub Greeting()
MsgBox "Hi there"
End Sub

On top of all that, we also tried out the InputBox() function... but that only really showed us how frustrating it would be for people to enter information if we used the InputBox() function... there has to be a better way! And there was :) We then delved into creating our own customised forms for our Excel applications! Wish I had a picture of one to put up here! But I don't! The last thing that we did in week 3 was getting the information from our form onto the spreadsheet... but there was a slight problem with our solution, can you remember what it was?

Week 4
As per usual, we started with a bit of revision, creating a small Excel application like a computer hardware inventory for a store. We set up our spreadsheet then designed our own custom forms, we even added an About button that told the world how cool we were for creating such a useful application ;-), but every time we entered new info it always ended up on the same line, cause we were writing code like:
Cells(2,1) = txtFirstName

Hmm... Lynne helped us out here by coming up with the idea of making our program to move down the spreadsheet checking each row until it finds an empty one, and then adding our new information! So that's what we did! Once we'd gotten it working for our HardwareParts application, we then went off and tried to apply the same solution to our StudentRecords application.

The present...
Not bad for 4 weeks huh? If you were away, you might not have covered all this yet, but that's ok, I'm keen for you to play catchup today! And, if you feel that all of this is seeming a little bit foggy, YOU'RE NOT ALONE! It's a natural part of learning - if you keep applying yourself and trying, the fog will clear!

So, time to write up in your own blog where you're at! Try to comment on anything that you need to go back over to finish, or just to revise, as well as the things that you feel confident about.

If you're all up-to-date with your activities (make sure you show me!), then start the excellent Microsoft tutorial that will recap some of what we've done, as well as introduce some new things! It's in three parts, so make sure you take a break between each! And write up a new entry in your blog describing how you fonud the tutorial (i.e. too easy, too hard, what was useful etc.)

Finally, if you finish that, we can start working on the first assignment! Remember, if you're not into Used Cars, feel free to talk to me about an alternative subject for your assignment that will demonstrate the same skills! (Ask me for a marking criteria, as I'll forget to print it out).