HRM professionals need to be familiar with using spreadsheets. The most popular one is Excel which is part of Microsoft Office. Also, HRM professionals predict personnel needs, i.e., how many people will the firm need. This is discussed in Chapter 5 of your Noe et al. text. Managers sometimes use rules of thumb to predict how many people they will need. For example, if an airline is going to add 20 Boeing 777-300ER aircraft they generally have a rule of thumb (some ratio) that so many more pilots and flight attendants will be needed to staff and support each airplane. Truck carriers may do the same thing. A ratio analysis is one way of doing this. But a more sophisticated way is to use Excel to make predictions on an organization's staffing needs. Thus, the following extra credit activity. You are the human resources manager for a hospital chain, and your organization is planning on building a 1200 bed hospital. One of the first things you want to do, because of their critical shortage, is to start looking for nurses but initially, you will want to ask yourself is how many nurses you will need to hire. To help you get an idea, you sample a few hospitals in your area and find the following information: Size of Hospital (beds) Number of Nurses at that hospital 200 240 300 260 400 470 500 600 700 500 620 660 820 860 800 900 Given this information please use Excel to predict the number of nurses you will need for your 1200 bed hospital