Teaching Spreadsheet-Based Decision Support Systems with Visual ...

Source: www.osra.org
Topic: Microsoft Office

Short Desciption:
VBA for modelers: Developing decision. support systems with Microsoft Excel. Pacific Grove, CA:. Duxbury Press. Boctor, D. (1999). Office 2000 Visual Basic ...

 

Content Inside:
Information Technology, Learning, and Performance Journal, Vol. 20, No. 1, Spring 2002 27 Teaching Spreadsheet-Based Decision Support Systems with Visual Basic for Applications Susan W. Palocsay Ina S. Markham Office 2000 has become a standard desktop application package for employees of virtually all Fortune 500 organizations and most small and home offices. The spreadsheet component of Office 2000, Excel, is widely used throughout the business world today for processing quantitative data and developing analytical solutions. The ability to build decision support systems (DSS) based on these spreadsheet solutions can facilitate knowledge management and increase information utilization within an organization. This paper describes our experiences in preparing for and teaching a new course offering for undergraduate information systems majors in developing DSS with Visual Basic for Applications, the programming language for Excel. As a result, we hope to encourage other educators to explore this new technology as a worthwhile addition to information systems curricula. The trend toward increasing complexity and uncertainty in the business environment, combined with the need to make decisions quickly and avoid costly errors, has changed the nature of managerial decision making at all levels of an organization (Turban & Aronson, 2001). At the same time, advances in information technology have led to more sophisticated computer software tools and greater end-user involvement in the design, implementation, and modification of applications based on these tools. The result is an opportunity to provide managers with timely information systems that can deliver the benefits promised by theoretical decision support systems (DSS). An early definition of DSS described them as interactive computer-based systems, which help decision makers utilize data and models to solve unstructured problems (Gorry & Scott Morton, 1971). Subsequent efforts to characterize these systems ...

 

 

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