Michigan State University Pivot Table Questions

I’m working on a excel multi-part question and need an explanation and answer to help me learn.

First, open the spreadsheet and familiarize yourself with the data. What kind of data is there?

What information do the columns contain? What kind of trends could you see if you graphed

that data in various ways? What kinds of observations are relevant to understanding budget to

actuals? You could consider such questions as:

Which projects are over or under budgeted hours?

Which projects are over or under budgeted costs?

Which personnel are over or under budgeted hours?

Which personnel cost the most? The least?

But you don’t need to limit yourself to those. You could analyze the dataset on other variables

or trends, monthly cost variance, or which personnel is better at estimating their hours. Also,

how could you analyze the data to see if there are any personnel who are charging an

unrealistic number of hours in total? Does that tell you anything? Then, begin your formal

analysis of the data. For this task, you are going to analyze the data using pivot tables for the

questions above and any others you think are relevant or interesting about this data. You may

need to filter, sort, or modify the spreadsheet so that you can see data subsets for different

criteria and set up your pivot tables. You may need to use formulas to compute new variables

to pivot on, such as defined buckets or sums or differences for some data.

You may also consider other ways to analyze the data. As you chart the data, look for trends,

outliers, patterns, and other potential insights. What do your charts tell you about these

projects and their performance?