Excel Capstone Intro Smart

Excel Capstone Intro Smar

Virginia Garrero owns a small business renting high-end handbags, accessories, dresses, and evening gowns. She maintains a workbook to track weekly rentals, analyze trends, and forecast product purchases, which may involve taking out a loan. Virginia needs to finalize and enhance her workbook to enable her to analyze rental data, calculate payments for new products, and visualize sales trends effectively. The task involves completing data calculations, applying formulas, formatting, creating charts, and preparing a comprehensive analysis of her rental business for informed decision-making.

Paper For Above instruction

Virginia Garrero’s small business specializes in renting high-end products, and her success hinges significantly on her ability to analyze her rental data effectively. The project focuses on completing and refining her Excel workbook to streamline data analysis, forecast investments, and visually present rental and sales trends, ultimately empowering her to make informed purchasing and financial decisions.

The initial step involves cleaning up the workbook by adjusting the worksheet appearance, merging cells, copying formats, and removing redundant sheets. Proper visual formatting enhances readability and professional appearance. Next, formulas are integrated into the RentalData worksheet to compute rental durations using DATEDIF or DAYS functions, facilitating accurate trend analysis. These formulas are extended across relevant rows to automate calculations for all entries.

Assigning a named range called Rates allows dynamic retrieval of daily rental rates via VLOOKUP, which is crucial for calculating total sales. A VLOOKUP function is implemented to match product IDs with rates, and the results are formatted using Accounting Number Format for consistency. Through conditional logic, discounts are applied when customers pay using Rewards, demonstrating the use of absolute references and IF functions.

The report then emphasizes highlighting high-value customers; sales exceeding $200 are visually distinguished by Conditional Formatting, aiding quick identification of key customers. Summing total sales, applying styles, and adjusting column widths help prepare the worksheet for presentation and further analysis.

Progressing into payment analysis, functions like COUNTIF, AVERAGEIF, and SUMIF are utilized to analyze payment method preferences and sales distribution. Data bars provide graphical insights into sales performance per payment method. These analyses support Virginia’s strategic decisions regarding customer engagement and payment options.

The project further involves summarizing weekly sales performance by comparing total sales against a sales goal of $3,000 using logical functions to generate a Yes/No indicator. This overview helps assess weekly targets and operational success.

On the Clients worksheet, text functions convert all client names to proper case, enhancing data consistency and professionalism. Then, the workbook calculates the monthly loan payment using the PMT function, including absolute references to ensure correct computation. Accurate financial planning is therefore embedded directly within the spreadsheet.

Finally, a combination chart displays the relationship between days rented and total sales, with total sales depicted on a secondary axis as a line chart. Moving and styling the chart improve visualization of the handbag rental performance over time, providing clear insights into product popularity and revenue streams.

Completing this project involves comprehensive data manipulation, formula application, visual formatting, and analysis presentation. These enhancements enable Virginia Garrero to efficiently track her business metrics, forecast product needs, manage finances, and make strategic decisions based on detailed, visual, and accurate data insights.

References

  • Gaskin, J. (2020). Microsoft Excel Data Analysis: Your visual blueprint for analyzing data, charts, and PivotTables. Wiley.
  • Jelen, B., & Alexander, M. (2018). Excel PivotTables and PivotCharts (Office 365 and Excel 2019). Pearson.
  • Kirk, A. (2019). Data Analysis with Microsoft Excel: Updated for Office 365. Routledge.
  • Higgins, A. (2020). Mastering Microsoft Excel: A Problem-Solving Approach for Business. Wiley.
  • Walkenbach, J. (2018). Excel 2019 Power Programming with VBA. Wiley.
  • Burkhardt, M., & Kelly, M. (2021). The Definitive Guide to Microsoft Excel VBA. Apress.
  • Excel Easy. (2023). How to use VLOOKUP | Excel Easy. https://www.excel-easy.com/examples/vlookup.html
  • Microsoft Support. (2023). Create a chart from start to finish. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/create-a-chart-from-start-to-finish-e81ef9bf-4452-4960-ab61-6527a6339f66
  • Nauert, R. (2020). How to interpret conditional formatting in Excel. https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-interpret-conditional-formatting-in-excel/
  • U.S. Census Bureau. (2021). American Community Survey Data. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs

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