Brunel Business School

MG1016 Managing Information with Technology

Assignment/Coursework Brief for 2020/21

Assessment Title: Excel Assignment

Module Leader: Dr. Masoud Shahmanzari
Distribution Date: Week 5
Submission Deadline: 12:00 noon on 20/04/2021
Feedback by : TBA (20 working days after the submission the deadline.)
Contribution to overall module assessment: 50%
Indicative student time working on assessment: 40 Hours
Word or Page Limit (if applicable): There is no page limit
Assessment Type (individual or group): Individual

Main Objective of the assessment

- To demonstrate an understanding of business intelligence concepts and their advanced applications to the business datasets.
- To develop the ability to analyse multi-dimensional data to assist the decision making procedures in organizations.
- To develop the ability to write efficient, and optimal excel functions to be used in the business data processing.

Description of the Assessment

This is an individual assignment. The assignment consists of three parts. Students will be asked to assist managerial decisions using excel built-in functions,
pivot tables, filters, conditional formatting, visualization techniques, and macros. Students should draw on their technical knowledge in answering the
questions related to the assignment.
Students must answer the questions of each part in yellow boxes within the excel file. Every student should submit one excel file. Students should not use
helper columns unless otherwise specified.

Part A. Business Intelligence Basics: The effect of FTSE 100 Index and other variables on the GBP exchange rate in the UK [40%].
You are given the information related to the UK economy since 2010 on a daily basis. Suppose you want to develop a forecasting model to predict
the value of EURO/GBP in the upcoming month. Hence, the first four variables are our dependent variables, and the “EURO GBP Rate” is our
response variable.

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A.1. Insert a new column in front of each variable to calculate the percent of change (compared with the previous day). Apply conditional
formatting to show increases with green arrows and decreases with red arrows.
A.2. Visualize the data on the line chart. Note that the values for the last two columns are much lower than the others. Hence, use the
secondary axis to illustrate them. Your chart should be self-explanatory so don’t forget to include all chart elements.
A.3. During in-class exercises, we have seen different forecasting methods. Implement all of the methods you learned to predict the
response variable. Which method is more exact. Why?

Part B. The role of pivot tables in improving business data processing [30%].
You are given a dataset for a company including “Customer_ID”, “Area”, “Payment Method”, “Transaction Type”, “Amount”, “Product Type”,
and “Purchase Time”. Your job is to create a series of Pivot Tables (or Pivot Charts) to answer the following business questions. You must create
pivot tables in new sheets.
B.1. What are the averages for purchases in each area?
B.2. What type of payment is the most frequent?
B.3. Do customers make their purchases at work (most likely between 8:00 and 17:00) or at home?

Part C. Data Reporting, Querying, Analysis in Excel [40%].

The purpose of this part is to test your knowledge of basic concepts and definitions of knowledge discovery in databases that form the pillars of
business intelligence applications. Based on the sheet Titanic that contains the following information on the passenger list of the Titanic: “class”,
“age”, “gender”, and “survived”. You should generate reports, write queries, and perform data analysis to understand whether survivors and
non-survivors exhibit a pattern in the Titanic accident. You may easily think of this part of the project in a different setting. For instance, suppose
that we are trying to distinguish between buyers and non-buyers of a particular product based on some transaction and demographic information
we have. The simplicity of the titanic example makes it a good case for beginners. As tools, you should use pivot tables, filters, and some data
analysis methods in Excel.
C.1. Using pivot tables for summarizing and reporting: Using a pivot table, analyze the number of survivors compared to the class of
passengers in an effort to see if passenger class might have an effect on survival. Justify your answer.
C.2. Perform a similar analysis with respect to a) age, b) gender, and c) a combination of various attributes on your own choice. Can you
make any conclusions based on these reports? For instance, can you hypothesize that women survived more than men? Did first class
passengers survive more than the rest? Here, you can look at counts, ratios, percentages, whichever you think is more appropriate.
C.3. Using Filters for query-like data processing: Filters under the Data menu can be used to generate a query-like environment in Excel.
Create various filters of your choice. What additional information can you obtain using filters as opposed to the reports we did for C.1.
and C.2.? Can you come to any conclusions as to who survived and who did not based on your analysis?

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C.4. Let us define a survival model like female adult passengers survived, others did not. To be more explicit, this would mean “If
gender=female and age=adult, then "we guess the passenger survived”. For this, on a blank column type “Model1”. On the row of the
first passenger type “=IF(AND(“ Then click on the cell representing the gender of the passenger then type “=”Female”, ” then click on the
cell representing the age of the passenger then type “=”Adult”);"guess_yes";"guess_no")” . If the logical expression is true, the cell value
will be guess_yes. Otherwise it will be guess_no. Of course this is not 100% correct.

Now, build a confusion matrix to see how accurate our rule is. For this, you can count your right guesses and false guesses and see how well you
did. A right guess is when survived=yes and model1=guess_yes OR survived=no and model1=guess_no. This can be done by IF functions, but a
pivot table would be much easier. Build a pivot table as below.
Model1 = guess_yes Model1 = guess_no
(actual) survived=yes
(actual) survived = no

In the titanic dataset, there are 2201 records of passengers. So the total of numbers that appear in your confusion matrix should be 2201. Based
on this study, how right would it be to say “adult women survived more” in Titanic?
C.5. Come up with a different model than the survival model above and complete the evaluation in the same way. Call this model model2.
Is model2 better than model1 in explaining survivors? Why?
C.6. This question is optional. You may also explore other data analysis tools to determine the attribute “survived” using the other
attributes (age, gender, class) as inputs. For instance, converting the data into numerical form and performing a regression analysis would
be one of the choices if you are familiar with such techniques. In order to transform your data into numerical form, you can add a new
binary variable for differentiating the gender, add several binary variables that serve as indicators for the class of the passenger, etc.

Marking scheme

This document provides you with detailed criteria that will be/was used in marking the Coursework. This marking scheme, like all marking schemes, draws on
the University’s grade descriptors to inform its design. Marking is evidence-based. As markers, we make our ‘judgement of the academic standard’, as it is
called in Senate Regulations. A ‘judgement of the academic standard’ is more usually shortened to/called our ‘academic judgement’. We use the evidence in
front of us to award the mark/grade that the work merits, in our academic judgement. The marking scheme and the University’s grade descriptors are used
to assist us in making that academic judgement when marking any work, including this Coursework.

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Grade Guidelines
Quality of Assignment 50%
Excellent work overall with all aspects of the work complete, well-presented and of a high quality; 40-50 marks
appropriate use of functions that demonstrates an excellent grasp of excel features; charts are
accurately presented and appropriately labelled
Very good work overall with nearly all aspects of the work complete, well-presented and of a 30-39 marks
sound quality; good use of functions and features that demonstrates a sound grasp of subject
matter; critique evident with good synthesis of materials from different sources; charts are
accurately presented and appropriately labelled
Good work overall with most aspects of the work substantially complete, well-presented and of a 20-29 marks
reasonable quality; reasonable use of excel features; tables/charts are accurately presented and
appropriately labelled for the most part
Adequate work overall with a number of the aspects of the work complete and of a reasonable 10-19 marks
quality; charts are accurately presented and/or are appropriately labelled for the most part
Inadequate work overall with many aspects of the work incomplete or badly-presented and/or of 0-9 marks
a poor quality, and/or many of the tables/graphs are inaccurately presented and/or
inappropriately labelled

UG grades and grade point bands [Senate Regulation 2 (2009 starters onwards)] are: A++ (17), A+ (16), A (15), A- (14), B+ (13), B (12), B- (11), C+ (10), C (9),
C- (8), D+ (7), D (6), D- (5), E+ (4), E (3), E- (2), F (1)

Submission Instructions

Coursework must be submitted electronically via the University’s WISEflow system. The required file format for this report is Excel (.xlsx). Your student ID
number must be used as the file name (e.g. 0123456.pdf). You must ensure that you upload your file in the correct format and use the College’s electronic
coursework coversheet. Please note that submissions of ‘.pages / .docx etc’ documents will not be accepted and must be converted to approved format.

The electronic coursework coversheet must be completed and included at the beginning of all coursework submissions prior to submitting on system.

Below is the marking scheme and it provides an illustration of each assessment criterion achieved at each of the grade descriptors for this level:

Academic Misconduct, Plagiarism and Collusion

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Any coursework or examined submission for assessment where plagiarism, collusion or any form of cheating is suspected will be dealt with according to the
University processes which are detailed in Senate Regulation 6.

You can access information about plagiarism here.

The University regulations on plagiarism apply to published as well as unpublished work, collusion and the plagiarism of the work of other students.
Please ensure that you fully understand what constitutes plagiarism before you submit your work.

University’s Coursework Submission Policy

Please refer to the College’s Student Handbook for information on submitting late, penalties applied and procedures.

College’s Coursework Submission Policy

Please refer to the College’s Student Handbook for information relating to the College’s Coursework Submission Policy and procedures.
* this can be found at the bottom of the page under the ‘Documents’ section *

Extenuating Circumstances Policy

Please refer to the College’s Student Handbook for information relating to extenuating circumstances and procedures.

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