Steps for Using Excel to Create a Digital (Paperless) Assignment

Do you have an assignment that you have students labeling parts of a graphic? Why not make the assignment electronic by following the steps below.

	What the Teacher Must Do
1.	Open Excel, making sure that a clean spreadsheet is available.
2.	Under Format in the Menu Bar, go to Sheet and then Background…
3.	Navigate to where the picture you want to use is stored.  In this case, the image I want is called Watercycle and is in a folder in My Documents called My Pictures.
4.	Select the image, and click Insert to insert it into the spreadsheet.
5.	Click in the blank square above the row numbers and to the left of the column letters.  This will select all of the spreadsheet cells.
6.	In the Format menu, click on Column, and then Width…
7.	Key in the number 1 to make the width of all the columns narrow.
8.	Now back to Format, and click on Row, and then Height… Key in the number 6 to make the height of all rows small.
9.	Now, deselect the cells by clicking anywhere in the spreadsheet.
10.	We’re going to hide the grid lines.  Click on Tools, then Options… and uncheck the check next to the Gridlines option.Also, check to be sure the Comment indicator only radio button is checked.  This will help ensure that students don’t check out each other’s work later.
11.	We’ll want to hide the extra images.  Click on a column heading just to the right of where the picture repeats.  Drag about 20 columns more to the right to highlight them.  Find the “Fill” icon ( ) and fill them in with white.
12.	Drag the horizontal elevator bar back to the left to return to the left side of the image. Now, click in a row heading just below the ocean’s bottom edge and drag down about 30 rows to highlight them.  Fill them in with white the same way.
13.	Add a textbox to an empty area in your image which will tell your students what to label.
14.	Now, save the spreadsheet with a new name: something like “Labeling the Water Cycle”, and save it on a common drive.
	What the Students Are to Do:
15.	Open the assignment, “Labeling the Water Cycle” from the common drive.
16.	Start labeling the image. Let’s look at the cloud in the upper right-hand corner of the picture.  Put the cursor on the black dot in the middle of the cloud and RIGHT-CLICK. Left-click on “Insert Comment”.
17.	A little red “flag” will be created at the upper left of the cell you clicked in, and a text box will be waiting for you to enter something in it.
18.	Backspace to erase any text there, and enter the word “Condensation”,Grab the bottom-right handle and diagonally drag it in to resize the box around your text.
19.	Click in another cell, and notice that the text box disappears leaving only the little red flag. Pass your cursor over the flag and note what happens!
20.	Continue adding comments until you’ve exhausted either the list of words or your knowledge, which ever comes first!
21.	When your students are finished with the assignment, have them click File and then Save As in the drop-down menu.  Have them give it a new name (Water Cycle – George), and click Save!
22.	When you call up a file to check,  go to the View menu and click on Comments.
23.	All the comments will show up together, making it easy to check for accuracy!If you try to print the assignment, the background doesn’t show up.  Thus, this activity is perfect for a paperless assignment!

–Carlton Matteo, Adjunct Faculty Instructor

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 10th, 2005 at 7:28 pm and is filed under FYC For Your Classroom. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.