Technology and Operations 411

Spreadsheets are among the most widely used decision support tools in business today, and have advanced to the point of providing powerful, general-purpose functionally.  The first half of the course introduces decision support modeling using spreadsheets, including:  what-if analysis; financial, statistical, and time/date functions; graphical presentation of data; organizing and extracting information from spreadsheet databases; and cross-tabulation of data.  The second half of the course includes importing information into spreadsheets from external sources; goal seeking; one and two way data tables; the use of a solver to find optimal solutions to problems; designing macros to develop semi-automated and fully automated spreadsheet applications; and probabilistic modeling to support risk analysis in the context of spreadsheets.  Lecture/demonstrations illustrate the features of spreadsheet software.  Lab work involves carrying out hands-on tutorials in a supervised setting, then reinforcing and extending conceptual and operational aspects of the material by doing follow-up cases.  Windows-based spread-sheeting software (such as Excel for Windows) is typically studied in the course.