Decision Support with Spreadsheets

Excel Skills for Business --- Spreadsheets have advanced to the point of providing powerful, general-purpose functionality and are among the most widely used decision-support tools in business today. This course deals with decision support using spreadsheets, including: what if analysis; financial, statistical and time/date functions; graphical presentation of data; organizing, sorting, querying and extracting information from spreadsheet and external databases and the World Wide Web; crosstabulation of data; data tables; creation and management of scenarios; use of a solver to find optimal solutions to problems; the design to macros to support spreadsheet applications; and data maps. An expert level of spreadsheet use is achieved. Lecture-demonstrations illustrate relevant features of spreadsheet software. Students do assigned cases on a computer to reinforce and extend conceptual and operational aspects of the material. Windows-based spreadsheet software (such as Excel) is used.