LA/UP 341 Fall 1998

Practical 3--

A simple spreadsheet economic evaluation
of the costs of a land use change

Work in teams to consider the land use category you have chosen for semester study.
Develop some summary notes on the kinds of actions that would have to be taken to make the changes you propose.
Prepare a description of the components of a financial costing of those actions -- including all you can think of of the material and labor costs -- and possibly any opportunity costs you can foresee.
Prepare a simple spreadsheet in EXCEL that estimates the simple economic costs of changes to a land resource in ESL.
Publish as an html document including descriptions of the elements in your evaluation and how you came up with the $ values, and a table showing the EXCEL spreadsheet as a table.

Working with EXCEL:

I have not written instructions for creating an EXCEL spreadsheet -- and I have not found a good on-line guide to EXCEL to help. If you do need basic help getting started, contact me as soon as possible. For specifics of making tables and graphs you may want to refer to the excellent tutorials Varkki George has written for his DURP classes.

Creating Tables with EXCEL

Creating Graphs with EXCEL

I have put together the following screen-grabs to show you how to step through using the EXCEL Internet Assistant, which can make attractive WWW pages from the spreadsheet you create. These are taken from the version of EXCEL in MSOffice for Win-95 -- the look and feel is mostly the same for later and Mac versions. Look for "Save as HTML" on the File menu if you are using a newer version of EXCEL. If you are using an older one, look for the Internet Assistant Wizard on the bottom of the "Tools" pull-down menu (see the second screen below). If the computer you are using does not have the Internet Assistant installed you can get a copy from the Microsoft WWW site as a free download which installs itself on Macs or Windows-95 machines. Follow this link.

Using the EXCEL Internet Assistant

Screen 1 -- make a spreadsheet table in EXCEL, highlight the cells you want to export to html by dragging the cursor over them as shown in the black area above.

Screen 2 -- find and select the Internet Assistant Wizard (IAW) on the Tools pull-down

Screen 3 -- the IAW-Step 1 window appears. It asks for the range of cells you want to export. If you already selected the ones you need as in Screen 1 the values will be automatically entered in the dialog box. If not, follow the example here, noting that A1 and D8 in this example are the corner cells at top left and bottom right of the table.

Screen 4 -- IAW-Step 2. You have two options - make a stand-alone table or insert one in an existing html file. My advice, my strong advice, is to check the first as I have and then cut and paste from the eventually resulting file to your own. I like to have the control in my hands, not the machine's!

Screen 5 -- IAW-Step 3. Hard to explain verbally but either experiment yourself or check out the settings I have used and compare with the output table below in this document. I only suggest you do not leave the defaults set but you may want to leave out some of the possible fields such as name and date of creation.

Screen 6 -- IAW-Step 4. Select the top button - "Convert as much of the formatting as possible".

Screen 7 -- IAW-Step 5. At the end of the string in the box there will be a default filename for the HTML file IA will create. You may want to change it, as I have done here, to something more useful and memorable.

and this is what the resulting file looks like, cut and pasted into your html page:

`Simple costs of a raised planter`

`item`	`unit cost`	`number`	`cost`
`6x8 railroad ties`	`$5.00`	`18`	`$90.00`
`weed mat, sq yds`	`$1.00`	`12.5`	`$12.50`
`sand, cu yd`	`$4.00`	`0.5`	`$2.00`
`topsoil, cu yd`	`$4.00`	`6`	`$24.00`
`mulch, cu yd`	`$2.50`	`2`	`$5.00`
`flowering tree`	`$45.00`	`3`	`$135.00`
			`$268.50`

Last Update: 9/22/97

Name: brian orland

Email: b-orland@uiuc.edu

Sample project -- this is what I expect:

John Bunyan's Tree Farm:

Conversion of abandoned residential land in Emerson Park to agricultural use

This example uses a simple balance sheet to show the costs of growing trees vs. the profits likely to be gained when the trees are sold. I have not included any costs of acquiring or leasing the land.

This case focusses on a real tree lot in East St. Louis:

The start-up costs are pretty much known since they have just been spent. For the labor charges I have substituted a low wages rate for the volunteer labor actually used.
For the maintenance costs I assumed a five-year time-to-harvest, five loads of mulch to renew tree rings, and a moderate amount of fertilizer/herbicide.
The lot will need to be mowed at least six times in a season -- a total of 30 times.
Some security surveilance may be necessary. I allowed for a visit every night for the full five years. It is interesting that this one item kills the profitability of the farm.
etc...

Costs of establishing a tree farm

Costs of a tree farm:
	unit costs	# of units	cost items
Start-up costs
materials
trees	$2.50	250.00	$625.00
peat	$13.00	5.00	$65.00
mulch	$40.00	1.00	$40.00

equipment
delivery	$20.00	1.00	$20.00
auger	$75.00	1.00	$75.00

labor
hole digging	$7.50	36.00	$270.00
planting	$7.50	48.00	$360.00

Annual maintenance, for 5yrs.
materials
mulch	$40.00	5.00	$200.00
fertilizer	$20.00	5.00	$100.00

equipment
mowing	$50.00	30.00	$1,500.00

labor
weeding etc.	$60.00	30.00	$1,800.00
security	$20.00	250.00	$5,000.00

*Total costs*			$10,055.00

Last Updated on 9/23/98
By brian orland

This table was created in EXCEL, then the area shown was selected, copied and then pasted into an open window in Photoshop and saved as a *.gif file, then inserted into this document in Netscape's editor. It lacks the elegance of the other method but is easier.

Please publish your page for this project to both the new account that has been opened for you on the imlab server and to one of your group's own CCSO accounts and publish both URLs on the FirstClassDiscussion Page by 9:00am next Wednesday.