Management has tasked you with the annual sales forecast analysis for its produc

Question

Management has tasked you with the annual sales forecast analysis for its products, people, and territories. You are to use last year’s data and a sales forecast from Marketing to produce a report that can be used by upper Management and the Board of Directors to make decisions for major changes for next year and beyond to meet your market challenges. The data is presented to you in text files, spreadsheets, and Word documents. What Excel tools will you use to prepare the data for analysis? What steps will you use to analyze the data? Identify and explain the Excel features (a minimum of four) that you will use to analyze the data. What graphics will you include in the report? How will you insure that you present an objective analysis?

Explanation / Answer

1. Create the data file. We use several worksheets within a single Excel file to represent our data at each major stage of the process, from our initial raw data through several stages of transformation to the final, analysisready dataset.

2. Clean the data. In this stage, remove any elements we don’t want to leave in our dataset, such as duplicate entries, out-of-range data, and extraneous characters. The outcome is a clean set of raw data.

3. Process the data. The processing stage is where we prepare the cleaned raw data for analysis through parsing, recoding, reformatting, and other actions.
4. Create an analysis-ready copy of the data. Here, we copy the final set of data for import into a statistics package.

5. Document the data. Finally, add any necessary documentation to the data file so that the actions taken on the data are clear when the file is revisited by others or at a later date.

In excel use the three columns what we need and use graphs for better understanding.

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