[Year 12 IT Apps] Excel/Access-specific questions

[Russell Edwards]

On 14/11/2007, at 7:31 PM, Mark Kelly wrote:

>  I would possibly not even notice an Excel-centric question since  
> it's the only spreadsheet I've used in the past 15 years - and it's  
> about the only Microsoft product I actually admire.

I agree on all counts. However, the VCAA software requirements list  
does not stipulate Excel. At the very least, if they are going to have  
Excel-specific syntax then they should mandate Excel in the software  
requirements list, wouldn't you say?  (I'm a pragmatist these days but  
I could easily imagine free software evangelists getting their  
knickers in a knot about that, though.)

To be fair, the Access-o-centricity was rather minor--all I noticed  
was references to "Autonumber" in incorrect options for Qs A4 and  
A15.  I suppose if you didn't know what Autonumber was, you'd discount  
those options as nonsense and be merrily on your way to the correct  
option, in any case.

Russell Edwards
Whittlesea Secondary College

P.S. My take on Q15: a phone "number" is not semantically a number. It  
is a string of digits from 0 to 9. A number may be represented in such  
a form (decimal place-value form) but its internal representation and  
the operations permitted upon it relate to the number itself, not its  
decimal place-value representation. There are practical issues, too.  
As others point out, kludging a number type to hold a phone number  
could lead to difficulties with non-digit characters, not to mention  
leading zeroes. You could also get overflow issues.  Whilst it may be  
convenient for range checking etc, the same checks ought also to be  
possible when stored properly as a string; if not, this is a  
deficiency in the DBMS/programming environment, not in the choice of  
type.