BUS 100 (Business Skills and Management) (TMA 1)

In BUS 100, the course enabled us to learn more about how the tool of excel could aid us in our workplace. Unlike what I have learnt in polytechnic which I am tested mostly on my mastery of excel functions; BUS 100 has taught me about additional rules of the dos and don'ts of certain excel functions. One such rule which I have found exceptionally useful would be hard-coding. Hard-coding would practically be the rule of separating cells deriving from manual input being separated from cells that are embedded with formulas. The purpose of this rule would serve the functions mainly reducing mistakes from being generated in the answers by not disrupting the formula cells. Some other important rules would therefore consist of components such as switching off gridlines, inserting table headers for aesthetic reasons as well as worksheet protection to prevent users from unnecessary tempering.

The above image shows that cell F20 involves only reference cells without any manual numbers inserted to prevent mistakes and confusion to users. Cells like F20 should be protected to prevent unnecessary tempering for users. A further step to identify formula cells would be to give these cells a different set of colours. The above image shows that manual input cells are coded as blue, historical figures are coded as green and formulated cells are black.

For our first TMA (Tutor Marked Assignments), we are expected to formulate models AKA templates to aid and solve our problems. The TMA was presented with 2 questions. The former tasked us to develop a model to decide the cheaper alternative of an item through two different marketing strategies. The latter was a question about identifying the penalty of the speeding ticket depending on the amount of speed being exceeded.

Question

The main solution of how I attempted the first question would be as shown above. Some obstacle that I have encountered when attempting this TMA in general would mainly be formulating the formula cells to be as concise as possible in order to show a more comprehensive code since we are being marked for the elegance of our code. The purpose of making the code concise would also serve the function for future coders taking over your work to make out what each code represent in order to improve the current model. One main feedback would be to reduce the number of rows for the price table to just the relevant amount such as 1, 11, 23, and 24 donuts to show the change in the decision factors. 

This would be how I have attempted question 2. Although the I did not encounter much difficulty in like question one. However, I think I have added too much information in this question. The feedback given was to remove the original table and just leave the revised table. Another feedback given was to remove the query table. I agree to the former feedback as it might confuse the users of having 2 similar tables. However, I think that having the query table would present an easier navigation to the users in term of finding how much demerit points would be presented to them according to how much speed they exceed.

 All in all, the skills learnt in BUS 100 would be highly relevant to me as an individual working in the accounting sector since financial reports mainly revolves around tabulating figures deriving from different places. With the skills learnt in BUS100 along with those skills that has been thought in my polytechnic, I can see myself developing models to aid my calculations more effectively and efficiently.