In this module, you'll be completing a spreadsheet assignment using Google Sheets. The entire tutorial is written out here, or you can work through each section below. There are also video demonstrations of each section of the assignment here.
If you have any questions as you work through the assignment, please do not hesitate to contact me. You can email me at ejkelly@loyno.edu, or make an appointment to meet with me via phone, video/web conference, or chat here.
Hi, I'm Elizabeth Kelly and I am your librarian liaison for Music Industry. I am here to help you with any of your research needs or instructional technology needs for this class, or for the other courses that you're taking in Music Industry. Today what I'm going to be working with you on is an assignment where you work with data. Being able to work with data is such an important skill now in so many different industries. In the music business alone you can use it to to balance budgets, assess your social media reach, analyze word frequency in song lyrics, and so much more. What we’re going to do in this lesson is create a budget for a band tour. You’ll keep track of what you spent on tour and what you made back, and we’ll even create a chart so we can visualize some of this data. You’ll be using Google Sheets for this assignment, but everything we do here can also be done using Excel, Open Office Calc, and other readily available spreadsheet software.
To get an idea of what you can accomplish with a well-formatted spreadsheet, take a look at the Generic Road Report Billy has created. This workbook has different tabs for each day of the week. Formulas are already embedded in the spreadsheet so that as you add in income and expenses, you always know your net income, or how much money you actually have available to you. The spreadsheet also includes areas for different currencies, so even if you are touring internationally you can easily convert your values to USD. For our assignment, you will create a slightly smaller version of this spreadsheet to track an imaginary tour using the values in the Intro_MIS_spreadsheet_demo.pdf.
Go back to your original tab. Spend a few minutes formatting your spreadsheet—make headings bold, give them background colors, etc. using the different options in the toolbar. Your spreadsheet does not need to look exactly like the demo spreadsheet, but try to make it look professional. Note that formatting is for appearance only and doesn’t (or shouldn’t) affect your data. Sometimes less is more.