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Business Calculus with Excel

Business Calculus with Excel is a free, creative commons licensed, text designed as a one semester course in calculus for business students.  The course was developed at Saint Louis University. 

Philosophy:

• The primary computational tools for business students are spreadsheets, so they should be taught calculus using that tool.
• Examples for business students should follow the terminology and usage from the business world.
• Since the course is typically the last math course the students will take it should be more conceptual and less focused on symbol manipulation.
• The selection and ordering of topics should be based  on the recommendations of the business school.

More details related to the philosophy behind the textbook are available upon request.

In general, the book tries to follow the recommendations of the MAA CRAFTY Curriculum Foundations Project, particularly the report for Business and Management.

Business Calculus with Excel is written in PreTeXt, a free and open-source authoring platform for creating the next generation of textbooks. PreTeXt generates beautiful HTML output that is readable on a smartphone and meets most user accessibility requirements.

The HTML version of the text is available online.

Mirror sites are available at:  
Runestone: https://runestone.academy/ns/books/published/ExcelCalculus/ExcelCalculus.html and
The University of Lethbridge: https://opentext.uleth.ca/ExcelCalculus/ExcelCalculus.html

A PDF version is available for download.

An instructor using the text for the course  may want to look at available resources and issues concerning local mirroring.

An instructor interested in the text may want to explore the philosophy behind the text and how that led to decisions about what to include.

A note on spreadsheet choices: The text was written using Excel at the request of the business school at SLU.  When the project was started, the solver add-in on Sheets had limited capabilities.  Since that time the Sheets Solver Add-in seems to have acquired the same functionality as the Excel Solver Add-in.  I believe the test should work with Sheets.

Mike May - mike.may@slu.edu