Spreadsheets can be used for lots of things including modelling.
This means they can be used for problem solving or can be set up to predict what will happen in the future.

Businesses often use spreadsheets to model financial situations. They might want to know:

• How many items do they need to sell to break even?
• What will be the effect if the running costs increase?
• Predicting future sales

Alistair's spreadsheet was put together to store, organise and present information but it can also be used as a simple model.

Spreadsheets are also used to simulate real-life situations such as predicting traffic flow for town planners. To be able to model this would be a huge advantage:

• It is safe
• In practical terms it would be difficult to achieve in 'real life'
• Can easily change values and introduce different variables
• It's fairly cheap
• You can repeat tests as many times as you want

That is the end of this module on spreadsheets. You have looked at the following curriculum objectives:

Derive new information (e.g. formulas to calculate information, such as a total or average): Level 2

Derive new information (e.g. a spreadsheet to calculate results using conditional statements with logical operators and other formulas): Level 3