141 E1.04: Section 2 Part 3

Summary. Saving the worksheet and printing the worksheet.

If you have spent much time preparing a worksheet, it is a good idea to save it. I recommend that you keep a folder on your computer and in a “cloud” location or on a flash drive for these files. Name the folder for this class and the files by the name of the topic and then by the page number or problem number.            Examples: Dpage3, Dproblem9.

When you are doing classwork, there is no need to print. I prefer that you not print then, because all the computers in the room share the same printer and it will cause problems for us if everyone tries to print at the same time. Also, the printers in the classrooms are often not working well. When you are doing homework, you will need to print some of your output. If you don’t have a printer at home, you can bring your file to computer lab to print it.   Be conservative about how much you print. Generally speaking, don’t print until you have finished the problem and are confident it is correct. If you need to ask questions about your work, an electronic file is much more useful than a printout.

1. Organize your work so that everything you want to print appears in Columns A-I. Material that appears to the right of that will not print on the same piece of 8.5 by 11 paper.
2. If you have the graph selected when you choose “Print” it will only print the graph. To print your numerical values as well as your graph, make sure that nothing is selected.
3. Never print long columns of numbers. These are only useful to view or compute with – not to read. When you have used long columns of numbers, then copy and paste the material you actually want to print to another page before you print.
4. To save a file choose File > Save As
5. To print a file choose File > Print

Example 5. Copying data from the web to a worksheet.

If you find data in an electronic file that is already organized into a table, you can just “Copy and Paste” it into a worksheet. This is very convenient!

Practice this by going to this course web page, open this document (in the .rtf file) and go to the animal data from Example 1 in this section. Copy and paste it into your worksheet. 

Example 6. Relative cell locations versus absolute cell locations

In Example 4, when you copied a formula and pasted it into another cell, you noticed that it updated the reference to another cell to keep it in the same “relative location.”   This is a very important aspect of spreadsheets, because it enables you to easily input a formula into a whole series of cells.   Occasionally, however, in a formula you will want to use a cell reference that doesn’t get updated.   Do that by using dollar signs.   So A3 is a relative cell location, but $A$3 is an absolute cell location and does not get updated when you copy and paste a formula including it to another place.

Make a worksheet that will enable me to look at any of [latex]y={{x}^{2}}[/latex] or [latex]y={{x}^{3}}[/latex] or [latex]y={{x}^{6}}[/latex] very easily.

The formula in cell B3 is =A3^$D$1. Below on the left is the worksheet as I originally entered it. On the right is the same worksheet after I changed the entry in cell D1 to the number 6.