Inventiveness is required

Since the homework problems do require some inventiveness and creativity, you might find it difficult to complete them if you start on them the night before they're due. Inventiveness and creativity are more difficult under pressure, so start your homework early.

Email questions take time

If you have a question about the homework, you can send your question to Rick Brenner. In general, we try to respond within one business day. Since we cannot commit to replies over the weekend, you can get more benefit from this email question-and-answer service when you start to work on your homework early.

Your right brain works all the time

You can jump-start your homework effort by engaging your right brain early. This is the part of your brain that's creative and inventive. To get it started, read the homework on the day following the session. Think about how you would do each problem. Spend no more than 10 or 20 minutes doing this. A few hours later, you'll find that you've made progress already! You'll have at least one or two insights, or a couple of ideas to try, and you'll have spent only the time it took to read and understand the problems. Some time later, spend an hour experimenting. If something is unclear, send a question to the course email list.

If you aren't sure how something works, whether it's a technique we're teaching you, or a feature of Excel, experiment with it. Keep two workbooks open in Excel — one that you intend to submit to us, and one that you use for experiments. For example, if you're unsure how the Excel function INT works, try it! Give yourself permission to try things, to make mistakes, and to try again. That's the fastest way to learn.

You'll accumulate a large number of Excel files in this course: homework, graded homework, demonstrations, solutions, slides, and so on. We recommend that you keep them in a hierarchy organized by session. To help get you started, here's a zip archive containing an empty hierarchy.

You can send email queries to rbrenner@ChacoCanyon.com, and I will do my best to respond in a timely manner..

When you do have a question, it's best to send it to the course list, because it's very likely that other people have the same question, or that when they see your question, they might be as puzzled as you are. Sending your question to the list ensures that everyone will see both your question and our answer. If you see a question on the list, posted by a fellow student, and you do know the answer, we encourage you to respond. Don't worry about being wrong — beyond being respectful of others' time and effort, and protective of your own reputation. If your reply to a question is incomplete or misleading in some way, we'll straighten things out. And we don't grade you on your email.

Some of you use email, but might not be in the habit of checking your email every day. We recommend that you make a habit of checking your email daily while you're taking this course. It's especially helpful if you check your email right before you begin working on your homework, to make sure that you have the latest hints and helps that might have been broadcast.

Most of the problems in the homework contain several parts, and it's usually possible to work each part in many ways. How do you decide which of several possible ways to solve a problem? To answer this question, look ahead. If you read the whole problem first, you may get some hints.

Let's say, for example, that you can see two ways to solve part (a). One method requires that you compute some intermediate result, and the second method is more direct. Generally, you might prefer the more direct method. But if you look ahead to part (b) you might find that you absolutely have to have that intermediate result from (a), in order to complete part (b). So even if you work (a) using the direct approach, you'll definitely have to compute that intermediate result anyway. In this kind of situation, the direct approach to (a) offers no real advantage. The cleanest solution to the problem as a whole is the more roundabout approach to (a), using the intermediate result.

When you approach a problem, you never know in advance which of the various approaches is best. It always pays to look ahead, to consider what you'll eventually need, and to make design choices that are most helpful from the whole-problem perspective. This applies not only to your homework, but also to your course project and to all real problems you might encounter at work. Whenever you realize that you've made a poor choice earlier in your work, go back and fix it. You'll be happier with the result, and you'll remember the lesson better for next time.

Many of the homework problems contain tabular data that you must enter into Excel before you can solve the problem. You can always type the numbers into a range of cells in Excel, but that's a lot of useless work. And you might mistype some of the numbers — which could lead to a wrong answer. Instead of retyping the data, click the icon next to the table to download the file homeworkdata.xls. Then load the file into Excel, and copy the data from there into your homework solution. When you paste, be sure to use the Edit>Paste Special… command (Excel 2003 and 2004), or Home>Paste>Values (Excel 2007), to paste only the Values, to avoid carrying along the formats into your homework solution.

Although we don't distribute printed course materials, you might find it handy to print copies of some of the files you receive for this course. It's most useful to print the Web pages and session notes. Most of us have only one computer, and if we try to look at the Excel files and the Web pages at the same time, we end up flipping back and forth a lot between Excel and the Web browser. This can be inconvenient, especially if memory is tight.

For most sessions, you'll find that it's best to bring with you a printed copy of the session notes and a printed copy of the problem set. These hardcopies are especially helpful if you want to make notes — you can write directly on the hardcopy.