Project, part 2: report, spreadsheet, presentation, email and backup

In part 1 you gathered and checked your materials. Now you turn them into the things the community centre asked for: a report, a spreadsheet, a presentation and an email. Each uses a skill from earlier in the course, so this lesson is mostly about joining them up and checking the result as a careful professional would. At the end you protect the work with a backup and complete a short simulated office task that tests the whole chain.

From research to deliverables

A Deliverable is something you hand over. The brief asked for four: a one-page report, a spreadsheet, a five-slide presentation and a covering email. The safest order is to build them from the most factual to the most visual. Write the report first, because it forces you to decide what you actually know. Do the spreadsheet next, because it produces numbers the report and slides can quote. Make the slides last, using only points that already exist in the report. Write the email at the very end, when you know exactly what is attached.

The one-page report

A good short report has a clear title, a one-sentence summary, a few headed sections written in plain words, and a list of sources at the bottom. Your audience is families with no technical knowledge, so explain every unit and avoid jargon. Use the facts in your source log, written in your own words, and mention the source in brackets after each fact. Use the heading styles of your word processor, not bold text of a larger size, so that the structure is real and the document can be navigated and read aloud by assistive tools.

The cost spreadsheet

The brief asks you to compare the daily cost of four appliances. Electricity is measured in kilowatt-hours (kWh). A kilowatt (kW) is a measure of how fast an appliance uses power, and one kilowatt-hour is that use continued for one hour. The calculation has two steps. First, power in kW multiplied by hours used per day gives kWh per day. Second, kWh per day multiplied by the price per kWh gives the cost per day. Put the price in its own cell, so that if it changes you edit one cell and every answer updates. The figures below are made up for practice. Use figures from your own sources in your own project.

The dollar signs in $B$8 lock the reference, so when you copy the formula down the column it still points at the price cell. This is an absolute reference, from the formula lessons. In D2 type =B2*C2, in E2 type =D2*$B$8, copy both down to row 5, and in D6 and E6 use =SUM(D2:D5) and =SUM(E2:E5). If your program expects semicolons or another separator, it will tell you. Check one row by hand: the kettle uses 2 kW for a quarter of an hour, which is 0.5 kWh, and 0.5 times 25 is 12.50.

The five-slide presentation

Slides support a speaker; they do not replace one. Use one idea per slide, a short title, at most four short bullets, and a large font. Five slides is a tight limit, so choose carefully: a title slide, the problem, the numbers from your spreadsheet, three habits, and sources with a closing line. If you include a chart of the daily costs, label the axes and write the key message in the slide title, for example: The fridge costs the most per day because it never stops.

Check the finished deck by running it from the start in slideshow mode and reading every slide from the back of the room, or from as far from the screen as you can. If you cannot read it, enlarge it. Add a short description to any chart or picture so that people using a screen reader can follow it. Save the editable file in 03-working and export a PDF copy into 04-final, because a PDF looks the same on every device.

The covering email

The covering email is the first thing Ms Otieno reads, so it must be short and complete. Use a clear subject, a polite greeting, one paragraph that says what is attached, one line about what you need from her, and a signature. Attach the final files only, never the working drafts. Compressed files can help if the total is large, but many email services refuse messages above roughly 20 to 25 megabytes, so check sizes first.

Back up the project

Work you cannot afford to lose should exist in more than one place. The 3-2-1 rule is a simple standard: keep three copies of the data, on two different kinds of storage, with one copy somewhere else. For this project that could be the folder on your laptop, a copy on an external drive or USB drive, and a copy in cloud storage. The reason is that different things go wrong: a drive can fail, a laptop can be stolen, a fire can reach everything in one room.

A backup that you have never opened is only a hope. After copying, test the backup: plug the drive in again, open the copy, and open at least one file from each of 04-final and 03-working. For the cloud copy, upload the folder with your cloud service, as in the cloud storage lesson, then open one file from the website to prove it uploaded completely. Record the date of the backup in a small text file such as 00-backup-note.txt.

Final security and quality checks

Before you call the project finished, run through a short checklist. It is what people in offices do before sending anything out.

• Open each final file from 04-final, not from memory, and read it once from top to bottom.
• Check spelling, numbers and units. Do the report, slides and spreadsheet quote the same figures?
• Check that every fact still has a source in the source log and in the report.
• Remove private details: your home address, other people's names, tracked changes and hidden comments.
• Use a strong, unique password and two-step sign-in on the email and cloud accounts, and never type a password into a link in a message.
• Check that the computer is up to date and that the files came from you, not from an unexpected download.

The workplace simulation

The simulation below is a final task in a pretend office. You will research, organise, write, calculate, present, send and back up in one sitting, with the same steps you have just practised, and it will tell you which parts to review. Everything in it is fictional and runs inside this page. Nothing is sent or saved outside it.