Text Box: Do you know how many sick days you have left? What is your daily rate of pay? When you retire, how will your sick day accumulation translate into a lump sum payment? How much should you save to cover your summer expenses? Your paycheck contains much of that information in a form that may not be easy to follow. We can use a computer spreadsheet to track the information and teach you a little about this often underutilized tool. A spreadsheet is a computer program that uses columns and rows (tables) to organize information. Although it is often numeric information, text can also be organized. You can perform common math computations such as addition, subtraction, multiplication and division on the numbers you enter, as well as complicated statistical and financial calculations. You can download a spreadsheet file with everything discussed in this article already set up. At the union website, www.chtu.org, click on the Union Technologist link. The spreadsheet is laid out in columns with labels for the various items on the paycheck we will track as well as calculations we will perform. The yellow cells indicate locations into which you must enter values from your paycheck. Sick days are listed on your paycheck in hours. To convert hours to days you need to divide by the “official” hours in your workday: 7.5. To have the spreadsheet do this, you create a formula that looks Text Box: like this: =sick days in hours/7.5. The = sign tells the spreadsheet to perform a calculation. “Sick days in hours” is replaced by the actual hours on your paycheck. The “/” indicates division in this case by 7.5. Instead of typing the actual sick days in hours into the formula, you can tell the spreadsheet where the value is. This will allow us to reuse the formula as the number of sick days in hours changes with each paycheck. Since the spreadsheet is laid out in a grid with each column and row labeled, we can uniquely refer to any location (cell) using the column letter and row number. For example B5 refers to column “B” row 5 which, in the example, contains the number of Sick Hours—3185.98. When you open the spreadsheet from the chtu.org website, you will notice that the Sick Days column contains 0’s until you have entered your values. if you click on one of the cells containing 0’s the formula will appear. Cell C5 will show the formula =B5/7.5. Once you type your Sick Hours into cell B5 and hit the enter key, cell C5 will display the number of Sick Days. When you copy a formula containing a reference to another cell, the relative reference is adjusted. For example copying the formula in cell C2 (=B2/7.5) into cell C3 adjusts the formula so that it references cell B3 (=B3/7.5) Text Box: using a SpreadSHEET TO Track YOUR Pay and Benefits Text Box: FREE Software (Open Source) Text Box: You don’t have to purchase Microsoft Excel Software to use the spreadsheet file described in this newsletter. A free spreadsheet is available at OpenOffice.org. This is part of a complete package of software tools that duplicate and add to those in Microsoft Office. It is developed and Text Box: supported by the Internet community for the public good. When you install the software it will ask you whether you want to automatically open Microsoft Office documents using Open Office. This will allow you to double click to open Microsoft Office documents. Text Box: The download of Open Office if very large. If you don’t have a fast Internet connection, you can borrow a CD installer from the Union Office. Call Monica at 321-0020 or e-mail: office@chtu.org This is part of a growing collection of collaboratively supported software.

January 2005

Volume 11, number 1

Union Technologist

WEBSITES OF INTEREST

·    www.openoffice.org
Free software to view change or create Microsoft Word, Excel or Powerpoint documents.

·    www.chtu.org
Cleveland Heights Teachers Union

AFT/OFT —  Local 795

Cleveland Heights Teachers Union