A. 1 ......... Dates are represented by numbers (usually, in fact, as the number of days since January 1, 1900) for a good reason. If we want a date to increase by one week, it's a lot easier to just add 7 to it than to try and figure out if the month ended or if we're in a new year or whatever. Adding seven is easy. Keeping a calendar in your head is hard.

Of course, most of the time we don't see the number; we see something like "Jan 11, 1984". It's useful to know that there's a number hiding underneath, though, so you can figure out what's going on when things get messed up.

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A. 2 .........

Absolutely! How smart of you to notice!! When we discussed the essential things a computer can deal with, we talked about numbers, text (often stored in ASCII form) and commands. Spreadsheets are a special way of organizing the computer's memory to handle these basic elements we already know.

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A. 3 ......... You're not. You can, of course, guess, but most spreadsheets have an "AutoFit" feature that automatically finds the widest cell in a column and changes the column so it fits.

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A. 4 ......... Textual attributes, like boldface and italics and the color red, change the appearance of whatever shows up in the cell. Changing the cell formatting actually changes what is going to show up in the cell.

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A. 5 ......... Not really, but good question anyway. Here's a useful experiment:

Remember, the underlying data (the number 36000) never changes; only what we see on the screen changes.

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A. 6 ......... Don't ask, just try it! The machine doesn't bite, and you can always use the Edit:Undo command.

The quick answer, for those of you without a machine in front of you, is "yes".

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A. 7 ......... We need a formula character at the beginning of every formula, first and foremost, so the spreadsheet knows it's a formula and not just normal text.

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A. 8 ......... Your first step should always be to check the online help. Try a search on the word "function".

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A. 9 ......... Good question. Think of it this way:

If someone asks you how to get to Hal O'Gen's house, you could say "Go to 1215 West Seventh Street" (absolute directions), or you could say "Go two blocks up and three blocks over" (directions relative to where you're standing right now).

By default, spreadsheets use the relative directions. When you copy the formula around, it is changed in whatever way is necessary to preserve the relative relationships.

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A. 10 ......... I've tended to use absolute addressing mostly for "rates". Tax rates, interest rates, commission rates -- all are things that you probably want to apply to a large set of numbers.

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A. 11 ......... NOOOOOOOOOO! If you do that, you lose the ability to ask some very important "What if...?" questions -- like, "How much money can the company save if we lower the commission rate to 7.5%?". If you keep the rate in exactly one place, you can easily change it and then watch those changes propagate through the rest of the spreadsheet. If you put it in the formula, it's hard to change and/or track down.

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A. 12 ......... "=B6*C$3" is the best answer for this particular spreadsheet.

Notice when we were copying stuff DOWN, the C part of "C3" never caused us any trouble. Since we were copying the formula from column C to Column C (from C to shining C?), the reference to C didn't absolutely HAVE to be locked. The 3 part was the thing causing us trouble, so we had to lock it up. Every great once in a while you might come across a situation where you have to lock just part of a cell reference like this. Don't worry about it. Just remember that it is possible so you can try it someday when nothing else works.

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