Chapter 21 – Recording Rubric Data
Tip: Excel 2002 or Excel 2003 will display a green error triangle in each total in column I. Select a cell in I and open the Information button to see Excel’s warning that the Total formula omits adjacent cells. Excel wants to include the numeric date in the total. It would take forever to choose “Ignore this error” throughout the life of this worksheet, so simply ignore the green error cells in this case.
Figure 425
Excel 2002/2003’s warning that adjacent numeric cells are not included in the Total formula
7. This would be a good time to save the workbook. Use File – SaveAs and give the file a useful name.
Using Trickery to Double the Value of the Worksheet Currently, the workbook is designed to show the progress of a single student. While that will be useful after a few rubrics, you might also want to show the scores for all students on one particular rubric. This is basically pretty difficult. If you build a chart with the X-axis based on the dates in column B, it is very hard to later change the source data to use names in column A. Editing source data is possible, but it is not something that you would want to do every time that you want to analyze student data.
21 Note: There are some Excel features that are hard to remember. My rationale throughout this book is that if you need to use one of these features every day, you will learn that feature. However, if you only need to use a feature once a month, you will be frustrated trying to remember it. On the other hand, the following approach uses a really hard feature just once, after which you will never have to touch the feature again for the rest of your teaching career. Follow the steps in the book and the chart will be much easier work to work with throughout the rest of the year.
Excel for Teachers
195