William P. Breitsprecher

Contact:  webmaster@clubtnt.org

Students learn best when learning is put in a context that has meaning and value.  Getting students involved with "real-world" or authentic problem solving keeps students engaged in active learning.  A content oriented approach teaches technology while reinforcing academic, business, and critical thinking skills.

Car Costs.  This project introduces the concepts of fixed costs, variable costs, and business decision making.  We use a spreadsheet to calculate the costs of operating a car.

Plan a Party with Excel.  Using the Word-Wide-Web and Excel's formulas and automatic recalculation features, we plan a party on a budget.

Dow Jones.  While the actual calculation of the Dow Jones Industrial Average is complex, it does provide an interesting framework to introduce functions in Excel.

Enron.  I put this lesson together while Enron was imploding.  Based on a cash-flow analysis, this project uses a spreadsheet to illustrate the chicanery of Enron's accounting.  It represents an engaging look at a historical event.

Business Statistics.  Getting started with business statistics is easy with Excel.  I strive to make sure my lessons are content-rich and not busywork.

Lemonade Game.  This online game provides an excellent source of data for business analysis with Excel. 

Graphing.  Creating bright and colorful graphs with Excel is fun.  This is the first in a series of lessons I created to introduce and review graphing.

Maps.  Making maps with Excel is easy.  They are just specialty charts.

Invoices.  Sending invoices is a fundamental business procedure and Excel templates makes it easy.  My Milwaukee Sausage Company serves as an example. 

Purchase Orders.  Ordering goods and services is also a fundamental business procedure.  We use Excel's PO templates to order supplies for the Milwaukee Sausage Company.

Accounting.  Keeping track of finances is a practical application of mathematic skills.  Spreadsheets are widely used in accounting.  This unit is built around teaching Excel, introducing basic accounting concepts, and reviewing math skills.  I have only posted the first three pages here -- contact me if you want to see more.

HLOOKUP.  Creating data tables makes a number of problems easy.  This project introduces data tables and the HLOOKUP function.  These last two lessons are written to provide a transition to databases.

VLOOKUP.  This lesson reviews data tables and introduces the VLOOKUP function.  I refer back to some of these projects when we start databases with MS Access.

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