Individual Assignment 6

In this assignment, I imported the spreadsheets from Excel into Access. Our class did this to show how each of the spreadsheets relate to each other. In Access, there is a key or primary key in each spreadsheet. The keys make each table unique and separate from one another. In this project, the keys were the customer number, concrete type, order number, employee ID, dependent ID, and truck number. To understand how each spreadsheet relates to one another we created relationships among the tables. The three types of relationships are a one-to-one relationship, a one-to-many relationship, and a many-to-many relationship. In this project all of the relationships were one-to-many.

I like Access much better than Excel because it made it much easier to find relationships among multiple spreadsheets by using a query. In Excel, I would have to go through multiple spreadsheets to find answers to questions such as the specific type of concrete an order had or who the employee that an order was associated with was. In Access, I can create a query that looks through multiple spreadsheets to find the answer for me. However, in Excel to get my answers I would have to go from one spreadsheet to another to find my answers. This process is time-consuming and inefficient.

I also created a form by creating a combobox. This allows someone to easily enter new orders because the combobox is a drop-down list that has information such as the customer name or the concrete type. It makes the task easy for an employee to enter new orders because if a customer calls and he or she does not know their customer number or the concrete type the sales rep can look at the drop down menu and choose the customer name or concrete description to get the information they need to complete the order.   

A relational database can be very useful for my future career because it can make relationships among separate spreadsheets, and help me to find information quickly and efficiently. Since I want to eventually work in hospitals a relational database can be helpful to find information about patients and their records, employees, and companies that we do business with.

Individual Assignment 4

In an Excel spreadsheet, there are tasks that you need to do automatically and repeatedly with efficiency. You can do this by writing a macro in Excel. Businesses or non-profit organizations might need to use macros to save time and to be more effective when they need to change a name or an address in their large dataset spreadsheet. If they do not use macros they might miss a name or something that they needed to change. If they did miss something it could cause a problem in the future when the business or non-profit organization is looking at the spreadsheet. Computer software is all the programs and applications on your computer (Kroenke, 2014). Therefore, Excel is a type of software. People using Excel can write their own macros to personalize their spreadsheets to make it more productive. People write macros by using coding. They write a source code which is "a computer code as written by humans and that is understandable by humans" (Kroenke, 2014). Then the computer turns the source code into machine code that humans cannot understand to perform the functions that you want (Kroenke, 2014).

In this assignment exercise, I wrote a macro to find a name and to replace all of those found names to another name. Through this exercise, I learned that macros are a lot easier to write than I thought that they would be. I also learned that they are much more proficient in using, especially for the function we were using it for, instead of going through and changing each name separately. 

Works Cited

Kroenke, D. M. ( 2014). MIS Essentials (pp.86-99). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, Inc. 

Individual Assignment 3

Grandma,
Recently you have been asking me about bits and hard drives and how they work, so I am going to explain it to you. A bit is defined by either a 0 or a 1. Bits make up a binary code, which is a code made up of multiple 0 and 1. Depending on the pattern of the 0 and 1 determines characters to write information. For example, A is 01000001. Each bit has a numerical value. To figure out this value you plug the bit into the equation 2 to the power of the bit. Therefore, 4 bits would be 2x2x2x2=16. Depending on the bit value you have determines the quality of colors and audio on your computer. For color the more bit value you have the better quality of picture you will have because it has more colors to choose from. So lets take the the 4 bits from above that totaled a bit value of 16. This bit value means that the computer can only choose 16 colors, which would not give you a high quality picture. Whereas if you have 24 bits your bit value would be 16,777,216. That means that your computer has 16,777,216 colors to choose from, which will give your picture the highest quality. This same process is used for the audio. If we take the 4 bits, that means a song can only choose from 16 sounds. Therefore, the more bits there are the more sounds there will be, which will make the songs you listen to sound much better. The same process is also used for the main memory in your computer or RAM (random access memory). The more bits you have for your RAM the faster things will load. For me personally, since I have a Mac I have a lot of bits that allow me to be more efficient with my school work by being able to have multiple programs loaded at one time. (Computer Clan, 2013) 
Want more information...Bits explained in more detail  

http://www.elon.edu/images/e-web/imagining/about/kidzone/asciibinarychart.gif

A hard drive is a square flat box that is small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. Inside the box is a stack of spinning magnetic disks with a recording head over each disk. It is like the record player that you have in your house. However, it is much smaller and holds more data or information than the local library that you go to. On the surface of each of the magnetized disks are patterns in the grain that form groups, which are the bits that we just talked about. Each of these groups are labeled as either 0 or 1. Information is written on these disks by converting strings of either 0 or 1 into an electrical current that is fed through an electromagnet. This magnet is strong enough to change the original 0 or 1 to the opposite. These 0 and 1 become information on the disk, and to read the information stored the hard drive uses a magnetic reader to turn the information back into 0 and 1. My hard drive allows me to store all of my school and works assignments when I save them, so that I can come back later on to view the documents. (Senanan, 2015) 

Want more information...Hard drive explained in more detail.

http://oblogs.co.za/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/Maxtor%20DiamondMax%2010%20200GB%207200RPM%20SATA%20hard%20drive.jpg

Works Cited

Bair, B. (2013, July 1). Inside your computer-Bettina Bair [Video file]. Retrieved from  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkFi90lZmXA

Computer Clan (2013, January 31). What Are Bits, and Are They Important? (32-Bit vs 64-Bit) [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptzGI9VaZmQ

Senanan, K. (2015, October 29).How do hard drives work?-Kanawat Senanan [Video file]. 

Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wteUW2sL7bc