I've been having fun building my "Rolling Gradebook," especially with the help from women and men behind the curtains here. I wrote the following to a friend who's a regional school administrator. How far from reality have I strayed?
"As for the gradebook thingi, I have become much more aware of what I suspected might be happening in the application of this extremely fast and flexible program, Excel. The application in your case is to be aware of www.jedox.com. In a nutshell, by having a Webserver that is built around Excel, which can have interactive Excel applications running very quickly on-line, and which sends and receives Excel files virtually automatically, we have a case of mea desktop est tua desktop.
In short, an administrator at the top can get realtime data right on his desktop, and subordinates can be sending it almost without not even knowing it. The path flows both ways, so it's not necessarily the ultimate Big Brother tool.
In terms of developing Excel out to the max, there is a very friendly on-line community, huge and world wide, at www.mrexcel.com , which is very helpful for solving problems, and which I suspect is running under a Jedox like product, if not Jedox itself. It's remarkably fast and shows of the ability of Excel to hand text and formatting issues beautifully. It is the best help line, free or otherwise, and it is free, I've ever encountered. And, if you got such a stumper that nobody can figure it out, you can pay for the experts to grind away at it. They apparently make their money selling books about the more arcane aspects of Excel, programming in Visual Basic.
I'm guessing that there are now enough games out there based on this programming capability that soon kids will be able to load an Excel file and start playing a form of Tetris, won't that be fun ! It does offer a cheap way to teach a programming class, using the visual basic module that comes inside of Excel for free, a fact that I missed until I really needed it to modify macros. I don't think Microsoft really wants people to know about this, as they've done nothing that I know of to publicise the possibility. It would draw away from sales of C++ and Visual Studio for K12 academia. I'll have to do some searching on the topic.
Cheers!
Doug Keachie"
"As for the gradebook thingi, I have become much more aware of what I suspected might be happening in the application of this extremely fast and flexible program, Excel. The application in your case is to be aware of www.jedox.com. In a nutshell, by having a Webserver that is built around Excel, which can have interactive Excel applications running very quickly on-line, and which sends and receives Excel files virtually automatically, we have a case of mea desktop est tua desktop.
In short, an administrator at the top can get realtime data right on his desktop, and subordinates can be sending it almost without not even knowing it. The path flows both ways, so it's not necessarily the ultimate Big Brother tool.
In terms of developing Excel out to the max, there is a very friendly on-line community, huge and world wide, at www.mrexcel.com , which is very helpful for solving problems, and which I suspect is running under a Jedox like product, if not Jedox itself. It's remarkably fast and shows of the ability of Excel to hand text and formatting issues beautifully. It is the best help line, free or otherwise, and it is free, I've ever encountered. And, if you got such a stumper that nobody can figure it out, you can pay for the experts to grind away at it. They apparently make their money selling books about the more arcane aspects of Excel, programming in Visual Basic.
I'm guessing that there are now enough games out there based on this programming capability that soon kids will be able to load an Excel file and start playing a form of Tetris, won't that be fun ! It does offer a cheap way to teach a programming class, using the visual basic module that comes inside of Excel for free, a fact that I missed until I really needed it to modify macros. I don't think Microsoft really wants people to know about this, as they've done nothing that I know of to publicise the possibility. It would draw away from sales of C++ and Visual Studio for K12 academia. I'll have to do some searching on the topic.
Cheers!
Doug Keachie"
