Spreadsheets and Googledocs??

I have to tell you all this has been one rip roarin' wild ride on the side of Spring Break to figure everything out in Excel. I think I have figured items out, however, Google Docs hates charts. Yeah, just can't stand them! Which for such a sophisticated program you would think is weird.
Now, I decided to do My Teacher Budget with this wild amount of $10,000.00 as my first year start up costs. Yes, many of you are out there saying your dreaming Becky. Since most teachers get only $200.00 to $150.00 from their schools. True, but in my dream world I live in the country in a log cabin with a nice wrap around porch to sit back on, all the kids in my classroom come ready to learn, and the President of the United States just consulted me on my secret meatloaf recipe......HA!
As for doing a teacher budget instead of a wedding budget, those of you who know me know the wedding budget is not in the cards. The teacher budget was something I really thought about. Graduation is just around the corner and starting out as a first year teacher can be kind of expensive. Especially in the Social Studies realm. So I decided to look at the categories of Apparel, transportation, videos, books, recordings, technology, professional development (not paid by the school district), Office supplies, Networking, Associations and clubs, and then miscellaneous. The spread sheet took me five hours to figure out, even with the tutoring videos. The charts about an hour. So I made two. I would recommend this be done in relation with the technology teacher training students. Once they have a basic idea of what their doing, then you can help to reinforce this skill by setting out a project with some basic items within the template.
Now Three Guiding Questions to help with the Template:
1) What do you want to measure? This could be the differences in what types of music in their CD collection to the number of women in the first wave, second wave and third wave that participated and what they participated in the women's rights movement for.
2) Is the thing you have chosen measureable? One must have a true handle on what they are measuring and whether it is a measureable concept. In measureable I can see things like How many women employed in 1880? 1890? 1900? Not only would this make a good chart, but it can show a direct relation to the cultural changes taking place across America during this time.
3) Have you made your data your inputting too complex for this simple project? The more information you place in your spreadsheet and want to calculate the more complicated the form becomes. Start off simple and slowly add elements in to projects.
Well, thats all I can think of now. Hope you all enjoy the Spreadsheet. If you have any ideas please email or comment for me.