Spreadsheets

Spreadsheets are something I feel I under-utilize.  My wife works at Ford Motor Co. in headquarters, and says she is constantly using spreadsheets to collect and analyze data, organize presentations, and use the myriad formulas to quantify her work as a psychologist.  Inside the classroom, I feel that I rarely use spreadsheets.  To me, they seem to be little more than a way to organize data, which is exactly what I use them for: entering grades and calculating averages, growth, etc.  Occasionally, we will use them in our PD as a way to organize which teachers use different techniques, or organizing our units.  While these are all certainly valid uses for spreadsheets, I just feel like such a useful tool could be put to better use, and I certainly do not use them every single day.  Because of my relative lack of experience with them, rather than utilize formulas built in to Excel or Google Sheets, I will simply pull out a calculator to calculate growth and class averages.  This seems to be the area that I would like to put to better use.  How can I maximize my time when entering the thousands of grades I input on a weekly basis?

That being said, one might imagine that my students to not use spreadsheets very often at all.  Occasionally the may use one when looking up their grades on MiStar (the aforementioned database on which all of Royal Oak Schools' grades, attendance, etc. is run).  I would like to have students be able to keep track of their own assignments, enter their grades, keep track of goals with their own spreadsheets.  Once again, however, the main limiting factor is time.  Limited computer time and access to devices that can run spreadsheets in a useful manner (they are still rather cumbersome on iPads, the resource that is most readily available) and I am left to enter grades manually.  Such is the nature of the teaching profession, though.