MS Excel Program for Physiology Students

This tutorial is designed to illustrate the use of some of the advanced feature of MS Excel to analyse data obtained with the Fastdaq data capture system during the course of Hons Physiology undergraduate cardiorespiratory practical and project work. It has been constructed using the built in features of Excel with the aid of the CTI Land Use Studies manual "Creating Courseware with Excel". It introduces the concept of spreadsheet analysis to undergraduates and demonstrates:

• the form of the physiological data obtained with the FastDaq software
• the ways in which it might be analysed
• the use of graphic functions to present data
• how to tailor the worksheet to individual requirements
• how to perform simple calculations with spreadsheets

Features

• shows that simple and effective computer aided learning material can be prepared using a commercially (and commonly) available spreadsheet program. Note that this program and its macros will run on Macintosh computers.

The software is contained in BMSEXCEL.EXE (a PC self-extracting archive). The archive file contains Excel macros for both Mac and PC versions of MS Excel. You will need to have Excel version 4.0 or higher installed on either your Mac or PC in order to run these macros.
To install the software:

Type the following:

BMSEXCEL -d -n <return>

This will unpack the files into 2 directories on the disk:

XLDEMOS and MACEXCEL, each containing 4 files:

GLOBAL.XLM, TOOLBKEG.XLW, RESPDEMO.XLW and MEDBOOK.XLW.

2i. On a PC:

Start up WINDOWS File Manager.

a. copy xldemos\global.xlm to c:\excel\xlstart

b. copy the xldemos directory to c:\excel

c. open c:\excel\xldemos

d. double-click on any of the three .xlw files to run.

2ii. On a Mac (with system 7 or higher), copy the files from the PC onto a floppy disk and then:

Start up Excel.

a. From Excel File menu, open untitled:MACEXCEL:GLOBAL.XLM

b. Save this sheet in the Excel Startup Folder (within the Preferences folder in the System folder on your Mac's hard disk) with the name GLOBAL.XLM.

c. switch back to Finder (or close Excel)

d. Double click on the floppy icon (untitled) on your desktop and copy all .XLW files from untitled to the Excel folder on your Mac.

e. switch back to Excel (or re-start Excel) and open any of the three new .xlw files to run.

These files were developed on the PC version of Excel at a screen resolution of 800x600pixels.