If you use a paper grade book or have to calculate the grading on some assignments before entering them in the grade book, I recommend using Microsoft Excel. With basic knowledge and an understanding of calculating sums, totals, and percentages; I believe you will find Excel to be a real time saver. In most cases, you just need to enter the grades and Excel does all the calculating for you. Even though I use an electronic grade book, I still use Excel to compile data from other electronic scoring systems, in which I have to calculate a grade that I would manually enter into my grade book. Keep in mind that a lot of online testing and lab applications allow you to port the results into programs like Excel via a .CSV file.