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:

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

• 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.

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

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

• 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 explain 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.

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

2.) 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.

3.) 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.

4.) 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.

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:

1.) 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

2.) 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.