Essay and excel homework

‘So What?’ Assignment #2 -- Excel

This is an independent assignment meaning that you may not collaborate with a friend. If you talk

together about the assignment and brainstorm ideas, you must be sure that what you turn in is yours

and yours alone. You must cite ideas that come from others – even if you are not quoting them.

Do not present an idea as your own, if it is not. When you upload your assignment to D2L dropbox

you are stating that the work is your own.

After you download the Excel data file associated with this assignment, please look through the

data, and then respond to the following questions that are used to assess your higher-level thinking

about issues of communicating information. This assignment asks you to think about when

analysis tools like charts, sorts, Pivot Tables are useful for business decisions.

1. (25 points) Your boss sends you this Excel file and tells you to “makes sense of it” before she returns from a conference. In narrative format, (two paragraphs about 500 words) do

the following: (a) summarize the information collected in the spreadsheet – what is this

information about? (b) what department do you imagine you are working in if this

information is being collected?

2. (75 points) By using analysis tools in Excel, write an executive report highlighting the three most important things the department (from b above) may take away from this

dataset. For each of the three important items list (1) the piece(s) of information that is

important, (2) why this finding is one of the top three most important things you found,

(3) the evidence in the form of a screen shot of your finding (for example a Pivot Table

that shows evidence of your finding).