Students' learning can be greatly enhanced by investigating models of real life socio-economic systems.
Spreadsheets can also get students actively involved in problem solving.
This covered Excel versions 3 and 4. The great attraction of this approach for lecturers, who have existing spreadsheet skills, is that with a small investment to enhance these skills they are able to develop educationally effective courseware from their own existing spreadsheets models and databases. The tutorial described how to improve the formatting of a worksheet, add text boxes and other graphic objects, create charts, and use dialog boxes. It also demonstrated how to write simple Excel macros that can be run by clicking on a graphic object, such as a button. Excel 5 has many new features that make it a much more powerful CAL development tool than previous versions.