Reference no: EM131116687

1. You work for a local construction firm, "DeVry Engineering Group" and your supervisor wants to test your knowledge and skills with Microsoft Excel and has instructed you to develop a spreadsheet to calculate weekly payroll for "15" employees with the following assumptions:

A. Each employee could have a standard hourly rate between $10.00 and $30.00 per hour.

B. Each employee qualifies to earn overtime at a rate of 1.5 of his or her hourly rate for every hour greater than 40 hours.

C. Each employee will have a standard 7.65% deduction for social security

D. Each employee will have a standard 14.00% deduction for Federal Taxes

E. Each employee will have a standard 5.33% deduction for State Taxes

Explain how you will structure and format your worksheet, including titles, column headings, and formulas to calculate payroll variables for each employee to determine "Net Pay" including and not limited to Total Hours, Gross Pay, Social Security Tax, Federal Withholding Tax, and Sate Withholding Tax. In addition, determine how you would extract overtime hours from a calculated value of "Total Hours" using a conditional formula.

In addition, your supervisor will need this weekly payroll report on a weekly basis and instructed you to keep the payroll history of all weeks within "1" workbook but has allowed you to decide if you would rather keep the payroll running on one worksheet or by assigning a new worksheet for each week. Using your knowledge learned in this class, descriptively explains whether you would keep all weekly payrolls in one worksheet or assigned to new worksheets by week. Defend your reasoning's on the approach your take based on what you have learned in this course.

2. You currently work for an automotive parts supply store. Your company is growing and is considering expansion. The company currently has three locations (North, South, and Central) in one state. Each parts supply store carries inventory in four categories. You have been presented with the sales figures for the last three years for each location and inventory category by store. Based on this information, you're tasked with analyzing current sales for each store by category and overall total sales by store and category.

Note: This is a four part question.

a.) Explain your approach to setting up your worksheets and organizing the data.

b) Explain how you will visually represent the data for the total sales of the individual inventory categories for each location for the time periods shown.

c.) Explain how you will visually represent the consolidated data for the sales of all stores and all inventory categories for all time periods in one chart or graph.

d.) Once you have finished the above tasks, you plan to send the Excel workbook to your manager for evaluation. Your manger is presenting your findings to the Board of Directors for justification for additional capital expenditures. The visually representations need to be concise and clear by able to support the requested expenditures. Explain how you would use the integration features of MS Office to incorporate the Excel information into other presentation media.

3. You are given a spreadsheet with daily sales numbers ordered by date from January 1st to December 31st. You have been tasked with finding the average sales of each month, then to reorder the months so they are listed in order from highest to lowest average sales. Give a step-by-step explanation of how you will rearrange the data so you can analyze the best and worst months.

Note: This is a one part question.

4. You've just joined the staff of the XYZ Manufacturing Company (XYZ, for short). XYZ manufactures only one product, the gizmo. It comes in two sizes, the mini-gizmo and the magna-gizmo. Both are difficult to manufacture, and consequently, the company closely monitors rejected units. The company has three locations, each of which produces both the mini and the magna-gizmos. You are automating the weekly production reports so that you can easily calculate total production for the entire company each week.

The mini-gizmo is priced at $3.25 per unit. The magna-gizmo is priced at $7.00 per unit. The unit cost for a reject mini-gizmo is $1.75. The cost for a reject magna-gizmo is $3.50. Respond fully to the following questions regarding this task:

Note: This is a two part question.

A.) The managers will e-mail their weekly reports to you on Monday of the following week. You will then produce the summary report. Explain the process for doing this. Give a sample formula to total the number of mini-gizmos produced by the entire company in a week.

B.) Each week, you will present the combined report to your boss, who wants to see both the summary and the individual sheets for each location. You want to add a header with the date and your name to each page. What is the easiest way to do this? Explain the process.

5. You have been tasked with analyzing an extremely large amount of data and to ultimately produce a report to share with the board of directors. The data is currently in a text file and has over two thousand records of data. Explain how you would use Excel to analyze this data and organize it to prepare a written report. Be very specific on the variety of tools you would use and the steps you would go through to analyze the data and to ultimately prepare a detailed report with recommendations.

6.You currently work for an automotive parts supply store. Your company is growing, and is considering expansion. The company currently has three locations (North, South, 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're tasked with analyzing current sales.

You have decided to compare the performance of the three stores to get a better idea of where expansion might be most beneficial. Respond fully to the following questions regarding this task.

A - The data has been provided to you in one .csv file showing weekly sales for all three stores for the last three years. Explain the tasks you must complete in preparing the data for your analysis.

B - Explain, based on material covered in this class, your approach to setting up your worksheet and organizing the data. Remember that you have only weekly sales totals for each store in the data.

C - Explain how you will visually represent the comparison of the total annual sales at the individual stores for each of the three years. Describe methods to make your strongest performer (the North store) stand out.

D - 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. You know that they may have questions regarding your work, and want them to know that you created the workbook so that they can contact you. Describe how you will convey the information regarding worksheet creation.

7. Fact Pattern:

You own your own small party supply and rental business. You maintain an Excel list of potential customers and clients who have rented or purchased from you in the past two years. 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 purchased or rented from you, they are coded as "PROS" for prospect.

You want to grow your business, and feel the best way to do this is to solicit business from customers who show a physical address in the same zip code as your business location. Respond fully to the following questions regarding this task:

A - Explain how you will use Excel to find in your list the people you are targeting for new business. Be specific.

B - You want to send a letter to each person on your list from Part A of this question. You have a nice form letter that you have used in the past. Explain how you might personalize the letter by adding your customer names.

C - If you get the results you expect to get from contacting your prospects, you want to be able to do this every month. Explain how you might use Excel to automate the process of separating your list as you did in Part A.

D - You want to gauge the impact of mailing to only your customers, to only your prospects, or to everyone on your list. You have the numbers for each group, the estimated cost per letter, and the expected increase in income for each letter mailed. What Excel tools might you use to see the anticipated outcome for each of the three situations?

8. Fact Pattern: Question:

Your company is planning a party for employees, and you have been asked to set up a spreadsheet to track the attendees and to calculate the associated cost. Each employee is allowed to bring one guest to the party. There are 50 employees in your company. The spreadsheet needs to be set up when the invitations are distributed so that you can begin recording the reservations as soon as they come in.

The cost of the party is not the same for the employee and the guest. The charge for an employee is $50, and the charge for a guest is $45. When the employee responds that he/she plans to attend, you want to add his or her name to the list. If the employee is not coming, then his or her name is not recorded. Respond fully to the following questions regarding this task:

A - Explain how you will structure your worksheet, including the titles, column headings, the formulas to calculate the cost for each employee (which may include the cost for a guest, and to calculate the total cost for the party).

B - The facility where the party is to be held will give the company a reduction in price if more than 50 people attend. The price per employee will then be $45 and per guest will be $40. Describe how you will set up your worksheet to reflect a change when the total number of attendees hits 50.

C - You want the employees who are going to attend and bring a guest to show on the list with a green background. Explain the method you would use to have this automatically occur when you indicate the employee's response.

D - You know your management team will want to periodically check to see who is attending. They will want the list to separate the employees coming alone, and those bringing guests. Explain how you might generate this list as requested using your knowledge of Excel.

9. Fact Pattern: Question:

You've just joined the staff of the XYZ Manufacturing Company (XYZ, for short). XYZ manufactures only one product-the gizmo. It comes in two sizes, the mini-gizmo and the magna-gizmo. Both are difficult to manufacture, and consequently, the company closely monitors rejected units. The company has three locations each of which produces both the mini and the magna-gizmos. You are automating the weekly production reports so that you can easily calculate total production for the entire company each week.

The mini-gizmo is priced at $3.25 per unit. The magna-gizmo is priced at $7.00 per unit. The unit cost for a reject mini-gizmo is $1.75. The cost for a reject magna-gizmo is $3.50. Respond fully to the following questions regarding this task:

A - You have decided to develop a worksheet for each manufacturing facility manager to submit each week. It should show total production and revenue, and total scrap and cost for each product for the week. Production of more than 25,000 magna-gizmos in a week, qualifies the facility manager for a bonus. Explain how you will set this up so that the managers enter only the number of units for each product's production and rejects. There should be an indicator of some kind if the bonus is earned.

B - The managers will e-mail their weekly reports to you on Monday of the following week. You will then produce the summary report. Explain the process for doing this. Give a sample formula to total the cost of mini-gizmo rejects for the entire company for the week.

C - Each week, you will present the combined report to your boss, who wants to see both the summary and the individual sheets for each location. You want to add a custom footer with the date and your name to each page. What is the easiest way to do this? Explain the process.

D - Describe the graph that you would create to accompany the report in Part C. Include formatting considerations to make important facts stand out.

10. Fact Pattern: Question:

Congratulations on your new position as loan officer at the Commercial Bank and Trust Company. You are dedicated to building long-term relationships with your clients, and you want to be able to answer their questions quickly if they call after obtaining a loan. The bank's system is a little slow, so you have started your own list of information frequently needed by your client. You are aware that it is extremely important that the customer's information be protected.

You process automobile loans for the bank's customers. The interest rate varies depending on the customer's credit score. Once you know the credit score, you use the associated rate to calculate the loan payment. You then store the customer's information including the payment date and the payment amount in your list for quick reference. Respond fully to the following questions regarding this task:

A - You have set up an Excel worksheet to determine the loan payment. It is set up so that you enter the credit score, and it finds and returns the correct interest rate. Then, you enter the interest rate and other required information to get the actual payment. Describe the Excel tools used for these tasks, and the information required to obtain the payment.

B - You know that your list of information on the loans will quickly become very long. Also, you want to be sure that you are not repeating information, and that you can't easily give out wrong information. You would like to be able to view one single record at a time to keep this from happening. A friend has suggested that you build your list in Access. What would be the benefit of doing this, particularly in the banking environment?

C - You want to use the Access form wizard to create an input form for your list. Describe the process of creating the form, and the special tools you might use to make it easier to use and less prone to errors.

D - You have decided that you would like to contact your customers by phone at least once a year to maintain the relationship. Explain how you would obtain a list of loans with anniversary dates in a particular month, and then print the information for your use in making these calls.