Analyzing Survey Data about New Product Concepts

Caffeinated Chocolate, Anyone?

The semester I was on sabbatical, one of the projects I worked on was market research for a company interested in launching a "functional" snack: caffeinated, and therefore energy-enhancing, chocolate. One of the ways we evaluated this idea was through a survey of consumers. In this module, you have a chance to analyze the data from the survey. This video gives an introduction to the data set:

The data set shown in that video is available here.


Exercises

Here are the exercises. This video shows averaging and tallying in this data set:

The video shows the COUNTIF formula: count how many cells in a range match a given condition. There is a whole family of conditional formulas in Excel. COUNTIFS (like COUNTIF, but you can have multiple conditions) and AVERAGEIFS are very useful. This ExcelFunctions.net page has some easy-to-follow examples of AVERAGEIFS.

Excel navigation tips like Freeze Panes, Hide Column (and Unhide), and Insert Column all make life easier when working with a big data set. There are plenty of videos on these topics and webpages that show step-by-step instructions. Rather than pointing to one that will mismatch your version or will soon be outdated, I suggest you search for explanations using your version in the search query (e.g., search Freeze Panes Excel 2016).

After the first semester this course was offered, we moved this module later in the course. Compared to the intro to draggable formulas module and the foreign exchange module, this data set has a lot more cells. There are about 150 rows and dozens of columns. If you don't have the $ (absolute references, i.e., locking a row or column) mastered, go back and redo the intro to draggable formulas. The caffeinated products module will be extremely hard and tedious without being able to drag your formulas.