Microsoft Excel fundamentals and applications

Excel Q's

(TCOs 2, 3, 7 and 9) You currently work for a home improvement store.

Your company is growing and is considering expansion. The company currently has three locations (East, West, and Central) in one state and wants to consider expanding within the same state. You have been presented with the sales figures for the last three years for each of your locations. Based on this information, you are tasked with analyzing current sales.

The company classifies the sales at the stores into two categories. They are either retail sales to home users, or wholesale to contractors. You want to determine whether the growth is in the retail sales, the wholesale sales, or equally in both to better develop an expansion strategy.

The data from these operations should be combined in the easiest way possible. If the data sample is small it might be easiest to just cut and paste the data into one file. However, if the three locations have a large data set then the "import" data feature can be used to integrate the data. Once the data is combined into one file then the sort feature can be used to isolate the various items of interest. Once the categories are developed then functions such as autosum can be used to total up the different categories of interest.

* A - (TCO 9) The data has been provided to you in one combined .csv file showing the sales for all three stores for the last three years. The stores all categorize sales as either retail or wholesale, but they are not consistent in how they do this. The West location uses a code of R. For retail, or W. For wholesale. The other locations use RS for retail sales or WS for wholesale sales. Explain the steps involved in converting the information from the .csv file to Excel, and what steps you will take to ensure the data is usable for your purpose.

The easiest way to achieve this is to use the sort function to isolate the data points that you would like to rename. Then you can pick the first point, rename it, and then drag it to replace the rest of the data points. However, in a huge data set it may be more efficient to create a rule to automatically transfer the data.

* B - (TCO 2) Explain, based on material covered in this class, your approach to setting up your worksheet and organizing the data.

Because you have all sales records, you want to summarize it by month.

Again, you could use the data sort tool to isolate the data by date. A customer sort could have as many levels of sorting that is needed to provide the range for study.

* C - (TCO 3) Explain how you will visually represent the comparison of the total retail and wholesale sales at the individual stores for each of the three years.

For sales, the best visual representation is generally a bar graph which would compare the different divisions against each other based on the time frame.

* D - (TCO 7) Once you have finished the above tasks, your Excel workbook will be placed on your company server so that all of the managers can view it. The workbook contains multiple pages, but you only want them to see the summarized data and your charts. Describe how you will ensure they don't access the other worksheets in your workbook.

There are really two options to achieve this. First you could separate the file so that the only information that you wanted the employees to see was its own separate file. However, if you weren't able to do this, for whatever reason, you could also lock the additional files with a password so that there would be a level of security of between the protected data and the unauthorized viewers.

2. (TCOs 4, 6, 7, and 8) You own your own computer repair business. You maintain an Excel list of clients who have contacted you for repairs in the past two years and a referral list for potential customers. The list includes both physical mailing addresses and e-mail addresses for each person listed. You have a category code to show whether the contact is a client. If they have done business with you, they show a code of CUST for customer. If they are potential customers who have not yet contacted you for service, they are coded as PROS for prospect.