The use of spreadsheets can be dated back into ancient times. It is evidence of how people always use an organized, visual representation of numbers and concepts in order to see a complete picture in a bird’s eye view. Fast forward a couple of millennia, and you’ll see that modern spreadsheets perform the same basic function as its predecessors did – to help people organized huge amounts of data and make sense of information too great for the human brain to grasp.
The advent of the computer generation also digitized this old method. These days, due to developers like Microsoft, spreadsheet programs have become a staple for people working in education. Although these programs are used more extensively in other industries, the education sector has also benefited in them. These days, the use of spreadsheet and other word processing programs are so integral to learning, that Excel courses are now considered de rigueur for every college student’s survival.
Spreadsheet programs are so important because they provide many benefits for the student. One of which is the ability to store massive amounts of data, may it be text or numerical, and make it very easy to access and share to different viewers. Aside from the benefits of being able to do multiple complex calculations for grades, budgets, etc., they also teach students the logic behind data analysis and complex mathematical equations.
Information and data management used to be very complex operations not suitable for anyone without a mathematical background. But spreadsheet documents have made it easier for the lay user, allowing them to manipulate, edit, and share the data stored in spreadsheets, using different functions and computations.
Traditional means of storing data are very difficult to share securely. Anybody who has access to ledgers and other spreadsheets can just look at confidential information which cannot be protected digitally. What’s good about spreadsheet programs are their ability to lock certain information from certain people through security means like passwords and such, making it very difficult to steal information that are highly confidential. In education, this can translate to protecting the student’s assignments and other vital information from being obtained by people who are not privy to them.
The ability of spreadsheets to analyze parameters and update any data that are dependent to changes in real-time make it really easy for students to perform complex mathematical computations with just a few clicks. They can even experiment with different computations to see which one is more applicable for a certain type of problem. The assigning of parameters, which depends on ranges of data to come up with a bottom-line, also allows students a certain amount of convenience because they don’t have to manually interpret data from disparate sources.
