SPREADSHEET DEVELOPMENT – ASSIGNMENT 2 by Joshua Davey

The brief for this assignment is in the box below.

Purposes of spreadsheet
The spreadsheet is to be used for storage of customer information, paper is
hard to keep track of and staff could make more mistakes on paper.
It takes more time to update records on paper and paper records take up
space, also being less environmentally friendly. Storage on computer is a lot
more space efficient.
Another purpose is to create a quick and easy look up reference of important
customer information.
The manager can easily and quickly produce accurate research into his current
customer portfolio. That could include the proportion of boys to girls, adults to
children and so on. In the membership worksheet, extra details about the
member could include favoured genres to target a more focussed audience
with mail merges.
Another purpose for the spreadsheet solution could be forecasting trends in
DVDs based on the existing portfolio of customers. An example of this would
be if there were fewer girl customers, then any future purchases of DVD stock
might not include Barbie films.
Proactive marketing campaigns can be produced very easily, in order to get
more types of customer based on existing numbers from the membership
data.
User requirements for spreadsheet
The staff will need the worksheet to perform certain tasks, which are;
INPUT member details.
- New customer details, a template may be created to create an input
form which is more user friendly,
- Amend address details,
- Amend surname,
- Remove customer record
PROCESS member details.
- Search membership details by surname
- Sort the membership data by surname
OUTPUT reports.
- Analysis report on age ranges of members
- To view the report as a chart or graph
- To be able to create a mail merge letter on selected data

Other factors need to be considered and built into the solution, namely;
CONFIDENTIALITY. There are data protection rules governing the personal data
of the members, so the spreadsheet needs to be equipped with security
provisions keep that data secure.
VALIDATION of data. The spreadsheet data needs to be accurate, so, for
example, where the spreadsheet entry requires a M or F for gender, if the user
enters a number by accident, an error message needs to show to indicate that
error.
 Detailed Worksheet Structure
The table above shows the data types that should be entered in each column.

Membership Surname First Phone Address Gender Date of Age Age

number name number birth range
NUMERIC TEXT TEXT NUMERIC BOTH TEXT DATE NUMERIC NUMERIC
NUMERIC & FORMAT
TEXT

Functions to be included are:

- VLOOKUP. This function will be used when a member wants to rent a
DVD or returns one. The staff member will want to look up the
membership number, so will search on the member’s surname.
- SORT. Staff may want to sort the data into alphabetical order by
surname, so it is easy to quickly search for a member’s details when
needed.
- PROTECT. Certain cells contain sensitive information that should be
read-only. Protect is used on those cells so that they cannot be deleted
by accident.
- TODAY. This function shows today’s date. This is to calculate the current
age of each member, so it updates when a member has a birthday.
- HIDE CELLS. This function can prevent important data being read by
unauthorised staff members.

Formulas to be included are:

- MINUS. The current date needs to be subtracted from the data of birth
to give the member’s current age on any given day.
- IFS. This formula needs to be used to correctly categorise the age range
the member belongs to. The formula outputs the correct age range if the
 member’s current age is inside that range. This formula relies on the
member’s current age working correctly.

Named ranges:
I have created a named range for the age range category, in order to produce
the manager’s report.

How the data is to be output

The report that the manager has asked for is an output of proportional age
ranges of his members.
The data I need to know is the age range categories and the number of
members in each range. I have created a small tally chart to make it easier to
create a suitable output solution, as shown below.

With regards to the mail merge, the spreadsheet includes:

 First name
 Surname
 Address
 Post code
  Age range
 Membership number

Separate letters may be created on Microsoft word for each age group
that the manager wants to target. From the word document I merged
the member worksheet and filtered the members by each age range. A
letter going to the over 18s was merged with the members from the
spreadsheet and 3 people appeared, as shown below.

I created a dummy word document called mail merge to test the output of my
mail merge from the spreadsheet data. This word document will be submitted
with the report.

Careful attention needed to be made to ensuring that the specific data was
entered into the worksheet in separate cells. In particular, the first names and
surnames were put in separate columns.
The design of the spreadsheet needs to be arranged carefully for an effective
mail merge into a Word document. The first row of the worksheet needs to
have the titles of the membership data, in order for those titles to appear in
the Word document mail merge.
Alternative Solutions
Members’ email addresses could be added and mail merges could be email
merges instead. This would be quicker, cheaper and saves paper.
Different output formats could be chosen to display the proportionate age
ranges. These could be a bar chart which would be good visually and could be
measured depending on the number of members. You could also use a table,
this would show the numbers, but not as visually appealing, although you
would get the actual numbers of the members in the age groups.
Test Plan
Input tests:
- A member’s details can be correctly added.
- I need test data to ensure that the age range works from the date of
birth information and that the current age of a member also calculates
correctly. There must be member data with different age ranges.
Data validation tests:
- Data types should be in the correct format e.g. gender should not be
numeric
- Date of birth should not be a future date, so I will add a member with an
incorrect future date of birth.
I will use data validation on the cells in the worksheet to make it so that for
example, if a non-numeric letter was inserted into age, an error message
would appear. I have created a line of test data to test each piece of
information on a member’s details.

Verification tests:
- Results show the expected outcome.
- Every possible eventuality is tested. I have included a male and a female.
Every age range needs to have some test data, the age ranges I have
chosen are 0-7 8-13 14-18 over 18.
Security tests:
- Data that is sensitive cannot be deleted without a password. The
member ID, first name, surname, address, phone number, date of birth
are all affected by data protection laws. We can use test data from the
above tests to ensure that certain cells can be protected with a
password.
Test Data
The following is a summary of my test data, taken from the worksheet
solution.

The test data was used for the output of the pie chart and the mail merge.
Justification for the final design-how it fulfils its purpose
My design has fulfilled most of the input design requirements. However I did
not do the template input form for new customers. Hopefully staff members
will find the design easy enough to understand.
The design can sort the membership data by alphabetical by surname as
shown below.

The solution is able to search for the membership number, based on a

member’s surname, as evidenced below.

The output of the proportional age range of members was a successful

outcome as a pie chart and looks an effective tool in planning for the future of
the business.

The membership worksheet needed to be rearranged slightly for the mail

merge to be as easy as possible, in terms of moving the column titles to the
first row. The result is that the titles of each column were easier to see when

mail merge was taking place. This is illustrated above.

The confidentiality of the data was successfully achieved, with the facility of
the spreadsheet function to hide information and/or prevent it from being
deleted or copied.
Again, in terms of accuracy and validity of the data, the test plan and test data
made for a quiet robust system, coupled with the spreadsheet’s facility of data
validation rules to prompt the user to enter valid data.
Design Constraints
A template could have been created to create a more user friendly form for
staff to input member’s data, however there were time constraints and it was
not completed.
I struggled to get the formula working to calculate the members’ current ages,
so I input them manually to test the remaining data and create the desired
output data.
Also, the named ranges I created for the chart data output did not create a
satisfactory result, so I had to produce a small tally chart in order to produce a
pie chart as the final solution. This is not the desired effect, as it negates the
benefits of having a spreadsheet solution. I ran out of time, however, to
produce a better automated system.
The search facility for a membership number, based on a surname, is not
functional for members with the same surname. The result is that the first
membership number with that surname is given. The facility would need to be
expanded to add more details about the member, such as date of birth, on
which to search.