As part of my new position, I am responsible for creating and sending all of the school’s electronic communications. We send emails to our families, post news stories and other announcements to various portions of our website and, staring three years ago, send pre-recorded voice messages to family’s homes. Last year the school switched to a new vendor for this service and I was tasked with reassessing that relationship and determining if it was in the school’s best interest to continue or to search for another vendor.
I investigated by collecting results data for all of the calling campaigns we had made over the last two years. I analyzed how often we used the service, how many calls we made when we did and whether or not there was room for cost savings. I determined that there was, not by switching vendors, but by changing our subscription type. We had been enrolled in an unlimited-use account but not been using the service enough to warrant it. By changing to a charge-per-call account, we were able to save almost 20% of the cost.
I used Excel to chart the cost structures and historical data for presentation to the Director of Communications who made the decision.
This is only one example of how Excel can be used in a school and a prosaic one at that. I’ve also used Excel for budgeting on various projects, as a grade book, to crunch numbers on survey results and to chart students’ self-assessment against their teacher’s assessment of their performance to search for congruence of expectations. It’s often mis-used as a simple list-making tool but its capabilities are far broader. I’ve taught Excel for several years and used it for my entire career..