[Year 12 IPM] Mini PD - Drop-down lists in Excel

[Keith Richardson]

Flat and/or relational - logically they may seem to exist on different
plains, but for me that does not matter.
I like to use with my kids the old analogy of many borrowers and many
things to choose between at the video store - from a borrowers
perspective: "I wonder which videos I will select today"; and from the
individual video's perspective: "I wonder which of these lovely people
will pich me today" shows that there are two ways of looking at this
'borrowing-happening' situation, so maybe the better way to look at it
wholistically is a third way - from the perspective of the 'happening'.
Then we create a "tbl-happening" table linking to both the "tbl-videos"
and the "tbl-borrowers".
So it is not really a big leap to jump to relational database
construction - merely a structure that enables us to represent usefully
a pretty common real-life situation.
After that I will be happy to move on to spreadsheets, with a different
typical life-situation to give spreadsheets a reason-for-being.
Cheers, Keith



On Fri, 01 Dec 2006 17:21:53 +1100, "Mark Kelly"
<kel at mckinnonsc.vic.edu.au> said:
> I'm a bit baffled too.  I'm doing U3O2 first ('cos kids do websites
> easily) and give kids time to practise databasing.
> 
> Trish Cotter wrote:
> > Thankyou Mark;
> > Now can you answer this question? Why isn't the Excel task in Unit 3 and the database task back where I did it this year Unit 4? It follows that a flat file database (and calculating tool etc.) should come before a relational database? Or am I being petty? The only reason I can think of as to why it is this way round is the online help component.
> > 
> > 
> > ---
> > Regards,
> > Trish Cotter
> > ^^^^^
> > tcotter at koonung.vic.edu.au
> 
> 
> -- 
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