Business Value and You Excel Exercises

Overview

Use Same Company For All Exercises:

Microsoft Excel is a powerful tool that is used in business and for personal use.  This semester you will have the opportunity to either develop or to test your Excel spreadsheet skills. You will have to complete weekly Excel exercises (12) designed to help you develop your skills in data collection, cleaning, and sorting data, formatting data, manipulating data, and interpreting data.  You will use stock market data for a publicly-traded company to develop your Excel assignments.

There will be several elements to this assignment:

First, you select a company to study, from the list below, 

You will collect monthly stock trading data for the 12 months from January 1 to December 31, 2023 for the company,

You will build a basic spreadsheet with some basic formatting and analysis,

You will then collect the same set of data for the previous 12 months (from January 1 to December 31, 2022 ), for comparison, 

You will graph data,

Print the spreadsheet to a .pdf file to share as a document,

You will do some more sophisticated data analysis using “VLOOKUP”, “IF” and “COUNT” functions,

You will then find the 2023 1st quarter financial statements filed with the SEC by the company, and do a simple analysis,

You will then listen to the last Quarterly Investor call by the company to shareholders and investors, and do a brief analysis, and then 

The final analysis will ask you to look at your Excel spreadsheet analysis, the SEC filing, and the quarterly conference call and interpret the financial performance of the company. 

1. Detailed Weekly Instructions
2. Each week you will get the instructions for the assignment in a short 3-7 minute long video.  The videos are a step-by-step guide for the assignment. Please note that the examples in the video use January – December 2022 data from American Express Company and you will be using data from a different 12-month period and a different company.
3. There are 3 sets of videos:
4. A set for users of Excel in the Windows operating system,
5. A set for users in the Mac operating system, and 
6. We are working on a set for Excel users in the browser.  If you use Excel in a browser, please use the MAC version until the browser version is complete. 
7. Use Same Company For All Exercises:
8. In order to develop your spreadsheet skills as well as your analytical skills in the context of a real world company, you will work with your chosen company for the duration of your Excel assignments this semester. 
9. Finding the Data for Your Company 
10. For your initial assignment, you will be asked to retrieve data for your selected company for the 12 months from January 1 to December 31, 2023  (not the same as the period mentioned in the videos).  You will get the data at Yahoo Finance. The video for the first assignment will walk you through this step-by-step. 

Please Note: Yahoo Finance will sometimes display the data in what appears to be improper format (with some months missing data, some months with multiple data points, dividend data added, etc). Please follow the instructions in the videos closely. It is typically the case that even if the Yahoo website appears to display incorrect data, once you download the date, the Excel sheet will have the correct monthly data. 

Uploading Excel Exercise Assignments to iCollege

Many of us today do not use a Windows machine but rather a Mac, Linux or similar operating system.  However, it is a best practice to share spreadsheet files in .xls or .xlsx format.  You also need to be prepared to share data in a format specified by a company, a client, a regulator, or the government even if you use different tools. 

Once you are done with your assignment for the week, you need to upload each Excel Exercise Assignments in either .xls or .xlsx format.  We ask that you do not submit your Excel assignments in another other format (jpeg, screenshot, pdf, numbers, pages, etc.).   

Company List for Excel Assignments (this is the company chosen and first two excel assignment’s done already).

Apple

AAPL

1. Assignment outcomes
2. At the completion of your Excel assignments, you will be able to:
3. Identify appropriate data to accomplish assigned tasks

Create formulas to solve and simplify Excel tasks

Demonstrate an understanding of using Excel functions

Create charts using Excel tools

Interpret tables, charts, and graphs