Using Excel to assist in your Arts administration productivity:

Arts Administration – for many artists it’s the side of their practice they’d rather not think about, but in our economic culture it’s an integral aspect of any successful Art Business. Luckily with the advent of technology, we have tools at our disposal that can help us manage this side quickly and easily.

Spreadsheet applications like Excel are my favourite way to manage the administration of art – in fact I consider it an artform in itself. The beauty of Excel for me is the simplicity of its function, and its ability to be manipulated to perform various tasks.

How to use Excel: The Basic Theory

Quite simply, Excel is a sheet of rectangles, or cells, into which information can be entered. This information can be two types:

• Data
  • Words
  • Numbers
• Instructions involving other cells
  • Total the list above
  • Calculate the total price times the number of items
  • Add up the total hours worked for each day

So it can be used either as a database or a spreadsheet. What do these terms mean?

[Read more...]