Business situations through graphs and tables
Suppose Procter & Gamble sells 20 million bars of soap per week, but the demand is not constant and production management would like to get a better handle on how sales are distributed over the year. Let the following sales figures given in units of million bars represent the sales of bars per week over 1-year (in no particular order).
a) Construct a histogram chart to represent the data using the appropriate tool from the Data Analysis ToolPak. Make sure to specify your own bin ranges otherwise Excel will automatically pick them for you and you will have very strange bin ranges with confusing decimal points. Make a list of numbers in multiples of 5, starting from 10 up to 40; then, show where the bin numbers are in the histogram dialog box.
b) Creating a chart is not useful in and of itself unless it is properly interpreted. Write a brief analysis of the graph. What do you see in the graph that might be helpful to the production and sales people?
17.1 14.3 17 25.2
14.4 12.2 11.9 26.3
15.4 10.9 12.8 13.5
17.4 21.5 39.8 30.6
15 20.4 20.7 25.2
13.8 20.3 21.3 26.2
20.6 13.8 22.5 26.9
18.4 23.6 21.4 32.8
20 19.1 23.4 26.3
20.9 20.4 23.1 26.6
11.1 15.4 14.8 24.3
12.5 20.3 21.4 26.2
14.7 24.4 24 23.8