The M&M Company is nice enough to provide us with a breakdown of the colors for each type of candy they produce. How does your data compare with their's?

(http://us.mms.com/us/about/products/milkchocolate/)

Spreadsheet Connection

Several of you have probably figured out by now that it would have been a whole lot faster to do this activity using a spreadsheet. In fact, you're probably thinking what we have on the table/floor looks just like a spreadsheet...

...And that's the point. We did create a spreadsheet, albeit a paper version of one. If what we just created made any sense to you, then so should spreadsheets.

Before we recreate the above activity on the computer let's get a few things down first. Spreadsheets extend in two directions and give us Rows and Columns.

Rows

Rows in spreadsheets are indentified by numbers: 1, 2, 3, ...

Microsoft Excel, probably the most popular spreadsheet program today can hold 65,536 rows of information!

Columns

Columns in a spreadsheet are identified by letters of the alphabet: A, B, C, ...

Last you checked you probably noticed that there are only 26 letters in the alphabet, so does that mean there are only 26 columns? No...

Columns are added by adding a second letter like this:

A, B, C, ... , Z, AA, AB, AC, ... , AZ, BA, BB, ... IV

IV (not to be confused with the Roman Numeral 4) is the last column Excel can handle. That's 230 columns.

Cell Names

As we discussed earlier, each cell in a spreadsheet is identified by a column locator and a row locator.

B7 is in column B and row 7

F22 is in column F and row 22.

Different Types of Information in Cells

Cells can contain three types of information: labels, values, and formulas.

Labels

Any cell containing a letter in the alphabet is a label. In our example, cell A1 is the label "Name."

Sometimes you might want a number to be a label, such as when you are organizing data into years. To do this you type a single quotation mark (') before you type the number. For example, if you want 1999 to be a label you would type '1999 in the appropriate cell.

Values

Spreadsheets are most commonly used with numeric data. This data is entered as values in the spreadsheet. A cell with only numbers is a value. In our example, cell B2 contained the value 7, the number of red M&Ms Darth had.

Forumlas

Values can also appear in a cell as a result of a formula. In this case, the spreadsheet follows the directions of the formula and places the appropriate value into the cell.

Spreadsheets recognize a formula by the equal sign (=).

In the M&M activity we used several formulas:

=SUM(B2:G2) calculated the total number of M&Ms in Darth's bag. Remember, this formula was a shortcut for the formula =B2+C2+D2+E2+F2+G2.

=AVERAGE(B2:B9) calculated the average number of red M&Ms in each bag for the team.

=B10/H10 calculated the percent of red of the total for the team.

There are hundreds of other formulas at your disposal as well.

The Next Step...

Now you're ready for Spreadsheets! Your instructor will guide you through entering your data into Microsoft Excel, entering formulas, and actually charting your data. Good luck!