Stand Alone Application from Excel

**samder68** · 05-05-2014, 01:13 PM

This is going to be a bit lengthy but I hope someone can point me in the right direction. I'm an English teacher who can navigate their way around Excel will a fair degree of confidence. I also have very, very little knowledge of programming. Here's my situation. I've created a program in Excel that calculates student growth if a certain amount reach a teacher-determined "Target" and then assigns teachers a score based on the state's requirements, 4 = Exceptional, 3 = Full, 2 = Partial, 1 = Insufficient.

It's a pretty complex program in that there are a number of ways that a teacher can enter their data... Teacher start with a set number of students for which they will show growth. They can define their Targets as a particular score on a final test (in comparison to a Pre-Test), they can define a particular Point Increase from Pre Test to Post Test, or they can define a Percent increase from Pre Test to Post Test.

The teachers can set their ranges for their own final score (4, 3, 2, 1) by either entering a number of students (out of the original) or a percentage of students (out of the original). For example, if 20 students out of 28 reach the Target, the teacher receives a score of a 3=Full. If 21 or more students reach the Target, they get score of 4...and so on. OR the teacher can enter a percentage of students... If 75% of the students reach the Target the teacher receives a score of 3...and so on.

Furthermore, the teachers can group the students by ranges (It's called the Tiered method)...i.e., High, Medium, Low, setting Targets (score, point increase, percent increase), and then determine what number or percentage (out of the group's total) will put them at a 4,3,2, or 1. The group scores are then averaged for one final teacher score.

Teachers can also use the tiered method with weighted averages... if there are more students in, say, the high group, then that score has more weight when calculating the final score.

That being said, my program handles all of the possible scenarios. It calculates by entering the # of students, defining the Target, defining the ranges. Teachers enter the students' pre-tests and post-tests, and a final score for the teacher is calculated and displayed.

My question... being a total non-programmer... is there a way that I can turn this into a stand-alone application? I'm having issues with formatting being that teachers are working with different versions of excel, on Macs, on PCs, etc.

I do NOT have the resources to pay a programmer to help me but I am willing to put forth the effort of learning how to do this on my own...as long as I'm headed in the right direction.

I am a graduate student, so I have the ability to get programming software at very low prices and in some cases for free. I'm working on a Mac which is also running bootcamp so that I can run Windows. I've looked at Visual Studio and Lightswitch but I'm not sure if either (or anything) can do what I'm looking for. I also wouldn't be opposed to making this a web application as I have some basic familiarity with web design.

If anyone is willing to point me in the right direction without being too critical of my lofty goal, I'd really appreciate it.

**shg** · 05-05-2014, 01:42 PM

I think you'll need a fair stroke of luck to get a useful pointer in this forum -- we ponder how to get things into Excel, not out.

Excel is just exceptionally convenient for applications like yours because it has a built-in gridded interface and a very powerful set of native functions. You'll have to duplicate some portion of that functionality if you abandon Excel, and whatever you do, it will be less familiar interface to the 10 zillion people that use Excel.

Maybe Google Docs is an alternative, but I have no idea how cross-platformy it is.

**MarvinP** · 05-05-2014, 01:51 PM

Hi Sam,

If you write this in VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) which sits behind Excel (in all but some versions of the Mac) it is possible. It looks like you have 2008 Mac Excel which is one without VBA, I think. Read http://www.macworld.com/article/1154...sualbasic.html .

I think this is your first obstacle....

BTW - in 1980 I did a similar problem. I really wanted to know if my students were learning anything in Math class compared to the other teachers. We gave a pre-test of 100 questions to each student in the department at the beginning and end of the year. I did stats using letter grade and pre and post test scores. I discovered the 100 question test only had about 18 good questions and was a very bad instrument to use. I also realized I was a hard grader based on other teachers grading practices. I changed my grading methods and raised my grades to reflect the department and schools averages.

My father-in-law, who had a master in education gave me this old dusty book that explained how to evaluate tests. The method was like this: Grade all the tests and split them into two equal piles. Half of the tests were the highest scores and the other half was the lower scores. Then count the number of correct answers in each half. An example would be with 300 tests, 150 high scores and 150 lower scores. For each question you would then count the number of correct answers. Say in the High group Q1 = 148 correct answers of 150. Say also 145 got Q1 correct in the Lower half of the test. If more than 90% of the total got the question correct, the question was too easy. The best question was where the difference between the high group and the low group/half of the answers were a maximum. I forget the number now that made a question good with this difference but knew it then. ALSO - if more students in the low half got the question correct than the high half, the question was a negative to the test and also bad. Once again, of the 100 question test only 18 survived the above criteria. In showing this to other math department teachers, they didn't know what to do with the data and continued to use the same test.

For the next two years I used a Student T score grade on every test or quiz I gave. This is where 50 is average and 10 is the standard deviation. A grade of 60 showed the student was one standard deviation above the average. These Student T scores have the ability to be averaged while percentages don't. The principal (an old x basketball coach) and most of the other teachers never got the concept. http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Can_you_average_percentages

I left teaching and went to the computer industry.

I guess the bottom line is you can't do VBA with 2008 Excel.

**samder68** · 05-05-2014, 02:33 PM

Thanks for the tips... I have Office 2011 at home, but I guess this forum logs the version that I have here at work... so I am familiar with the VB functionality.

I agree that Excel is a familiar platform for most users... even English teachers

I'm just really struggling with formatting issues at this point.

I can distribute what I have now, but I think I'm still going to explore other stand alone options...if they exist.

Thanks again!