Use Excel to plan and budget a solo holiday from Hobart to one of four Australian cities — and research the traditional place names of where you leave from and where you land.
In this lesson, your task is to use Excel (a program that allows you to create a spreadsheet to store and calculate data) to plan for a holiday during March or April.
For this holiday, you will be flying solo (in economy) to one of 4 Australian cities, with a few activities. You will have a total budget of $1,500.
Note: The menus don't appear on this video when I select the dropdown option beside "merge and centre", "text size" and "borders".
Each card links to a short article on the traditional place name of that city — you will need this again later.
Create a new Excel file, merge cells B2 – J2, enter in the heading "My holiday from Hobart to _________", and alter the text size, text colour, background colour and border.
Find a flight to your chosen location (travelling during March/April). You will be staying there for 2 – 3 nights.
Enter the details of the flight (look at the example shown below, but customise it to be relevant for what you have researched). Also, include a screenshot/image as evidence of your chosen flight (use the Snipping Tool / prt sc).
Save your file into your OneDrive "Digital Tech" subject folder. Give it the filename "Holiday Planning".
Research the palawa kani place name (map link ↗) for a location near our airport (so, don't use nipaluna, as we need to be a little more specific), as well as the aboriginal name for where you are travelling to (the links to your destination city in "Part One" above will help you).
You may need to search for where the Hobart Airport is in Google Maps ↗, and then compare that to the palawa kani map.
🤔 Why can it be difficult to find the traditional name of a place online? Have a think — we will discuss this as a class.
Include the traditional place names in your holiday planning Excel document (as shown below).
Find at least 3 activities that you can do — 2 that you will have to pay for, and 1 that is free. (Trip Advisor ↗)
Add in a section for "Food", "Local Transport" and "Spending", and enter an estimate for how much you will spend on each of these. Add in borders + cell colour.
Create a calculation that provides the total cost of the holiday (remember to begin your formula with "=", and use the cell references). This should add up:
Add in an extra section called "Total Budget", and in the cell to the right of it, enter in $1500.
Add in one final calculation (you can title this: "Remaining Funds"), that subtracts the total cost of your holiday from the total budget. Can you afford this trip?
You may need to adjust some of the values in "Food", "Local Transport" and "Miscellaneous" to make this affordable, or to figure out the maximum that you could spend for each of these (without blowing your budget). Don't worry if your trip ends up costing more than $1500 — this calculation will show you how much more you would need to save up before the holiday, especially if you are flying to Darwin.
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Your finished spreadsheet should look something like this:
Can you create a graph that shows the breakdown of your spending, similar to what is shown in the video below?
WATCH ON YOUTUBE ↗Tick each item off as you complete it. (Your ticks reset if you close the page — this is a working checklist, not your submission!)
✈ All checked in — you're ready for takeoff!
| Developing | Consolidating | Extending | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Information | Flight, accommodation and activity information has been included, but some details are missing. | All required information has been included, with traditional place names, travel (dates, times, cost), accommodation (name, cost), activities (name, cost), food, local transport and miscellaneous. | Low: Budget calculations are functional, accurately tallying up the total cost of expenditure, and subtracting it from the total budget of $1500. High: A suitable chart/graph has been used to show the breakdown of your budget costs (i.e. not a column graph). |
| Formatting | Some, but not all of the following: background colour, text colour, borders, and cell merging. | Your Excel worksheet is similar in appearance to the example shown, with evidence of background colour, text colour, borders, and cell merging used to provide a suitable structure for your budget analysis. | Visual representation of the data has been included, with a chart/graph showing the breakdown of spending. |
For a warm-up today, we'll use Excel to create some pixel art (this is in a new spreadsheet document). This should take you about 10 mins to complete.
For this to work properly, we will need to adjust the size of our cells, since pixels are normally square (not rectangles!). We'll change the width of our cells to 2.9.
The video below will explain how to set up a new file. See if you can successfully create a cartoon or computer game character.
