Course Project: Excel Objectives, Guidelines, And Grading

Course Project Excel Project objectives guidelines grading Rubricsobje

Conduct a comprehensive Excel data analysis project involving importing data, formatting, documentation, analysis, visualization, and reporting. The project includes importing sales data, applying professional formatting, documenting the analysis process, performing multiple analyses on separate worksheets, creating a memo report with embedded charts and data, and reflecting on Excel data analysis skills.

Paper For Above instruction

The course project requires participants to engage in a detailed data analysis exercise using Excel, focusing on sales data imported from a CSV file. The initial step involves importing the data from SalesData.csv, ensuring that the data is clean, organized, and formatted professionally according to the standards studied during the first week of the course. Proper formatting includes appropriate use of fonts, colors, borders, and number formats to enhance readability and presentation quality.

Documentation plays a crucial role in this project. A dedicated documentation sheet should be added to the workbook, providing information about the author, purpose, date, and summaries of each worksheet created during analysis. This documentation helps to clarify the intent behind each analysis and enhances the professional quality of the report.

One or more calculated fields should be incorporated into the data set to facilitate analysis. These calculated fields could include profit margins, discounts, or other relevant metrics. The calculated data should be uniformly copied across all relevant rows to enable accurate and efficient analysis.

Analysis of the data must be conducted in at least three distinct ways, each on a separate, clearly labeled worksheet. These analyses should be well-formatted, with titles, comments, and explanations. Examples of potential analyses include sorting data based on discount levels to evaluate their effectiveness, graphing sales over time to identify trends, and creating pivot tables to summarize sales by quarter, country, category, and salesperson. Subtotal and total functions can be utilized to analyze sales performance across different segments.

For a more advanced challenge, conducting a What-If analysis is encouraged. This involves simulating various scenarios, such as increasing prices by specific percentages while considering a possible decline in sales. The goal is to identify the most beneficial combinations of pricing and sales volume adjustments.

The culmination of this project is a recommendation memo written in Word using the integration techniques learned during the course. The memo should include one paragraph per data analysis worksheet, explaining the analysis performed, the key findings, and practical recommendations. An additional paragraph should reflect on three insights gained about using Excel for data analysis.

The final submission includes both the Excel workbook with all analyses and formatting, and the Word memo report. The workbook should be streamlined by removing unnecessary sheets to keep the file compact. All content, including charts and data, should be properly integrated into the memo with clear references.

This comprehensive project aims to develop skills in data importation, formatting, documentation, multi-faceted analysis, visualization, scenario modeling, and professional reporting, aligning with the ultimate goal of employing Excel for effective data-driven decision making.

References

• Albright, S. C., Winston, W. L., & Zappe, C. J. (2016). Data Analysis and Decision Making. Cengage Learning.
• Clark, S. (2017). Excel Data Analysis: Your visual blueprint for analyzing data, charts, and PivotTables. Wiley.
• Kamikawa, S., & Lee, D. (2018). Advanced Excel for Data Analysis. Springer.
• Levine, D. M., Stephan, D. F., Krehbiel, T. C., & Berenson, M. L. (2018). Business Analytics. Pearson.
• Neudert, R., & Ladwig, J. (2019). Mastering Excel for Data Analysis. Routledge.
• Roberts, J. (2020). Practical Data Analysis with Excel. Packt Publishing.
• Simpson, A., & Upton, D. M. (2019). Excel Data Analysis: Your visual blueprint for analyzing data, charts, and PivotTables. Wiley.
• Vohra, N. (2021). Data Analysis Using Excel. McGraw-Hill Education.
• Watson, M. (2015). Introduction to Data Analysis Using Excel. Springer.
• Williams, S. (2018). The Excel Data Analysis Toolbox. CRC Press.