Spreadsheets organize information in rows and columns. To keep track of where something is on a spreadsheet, the rows are generally labeled with numbers (1, 2, 3, etc.) while the columns are labeled with letters (A, B, C, etc.) Jeanne decided she would use the rows of the spreadsheet to track information about each of her four customers (called India Almonds, India Grocers, India Hotels, and India Foods). She would use the columns to track each category of information.

But what did she need to calculate? Jeanne decided she would need to track five different things:

Number of bags ordered. The first and most important piece of information she needed was already on each customer’s order fax: how many bags of almonds they wanted to buy.

Number of pounds ordered. Blue Diamond shipped inshell almonds in 50-pound bags. To give her instructions to the processing plant, Jeanne would need to calculate how many pounds of almonds each customer had ordered.

Number of cargo containers needed. Jeanne knew a 40-foot-long cargo container could hold 45,000 pounds of inshell almond bags; a 20-foot-long cargo container could hold 22,500 pounds of the bags. How many 40-foot and 20-foot containers would her customers need? Customers could not share containers. Any load that would fill 1/2 or less of a 40-foot container would be put into a 20-foot container.