New! Beginning Data Cleaning (ETL) & Analytics Project for Excel: KAT Concession Supply

Just posted this project on the other blog I co-author, Accounting Is Analytics. I am really excited about this project – it introduces accounting students to basic data cleaning and analytics concepts using Excel. Read on for how to request this first beginning level project that uses Excel for data cleaning and analytics.

A key step in data analytics is getting the data ready for use – in fact, this step can take more time and effort than the analysis of the data. This brand-new Excel project focuses on the data cleaning aspect of data analytics and is appropriate for introductory accounting – but could be adapted to any accounting class.

KAT Concession Supply is a fictitious company that supplies food, paper products, and other items to fairs, amusement parks, and other organizations. Information in the KAT Concession Supply data sets includes information about its sales over a three-year period. The data from KAT Concession Supply has errors and irregularities in it and it must be cleaned so that an interactive dashboard about its operations can be prepared. This Excel project is classified as beginner because it takes less than an hour to complete the entire project and the Excel steps are pretty basic.

Complete step-by-step tutorial videos and an instructor guide are available to make project adoption easy and painless in accounting courses. The project is available at no cost for instructors to use in their classes.

Beginner project for Excel

The data cleaning and other tasks in the beginner version of the Excel data cleaning project are:

1. Widen all columns to automatically fit the contents
2. Find and remove duplicate records
3. Remove unwanted characters such as numbers, spaces, and nonprintable characters from fields
4. Find and replace text with replacement text
5. Change the case of a text field to uppercase or lowercase
6. Format numbers
7. Create a two-visualization interactive dashboard

Tutorial videos/PDFs

Complete step-by-step instructions are provided for this project. Students have the choice of viewing the tutorial videos or downloading a pdf file of the annotated slides. The tutorials for this project have been split into two parts. You can view the tutorial videos here as a preview of this project:

1. Part 1: Data cleaning tutorial (video | pdf)
2. Part 2: Dashboard tutorial (video | pdf)

***You can obtain the Instructor Guide for the KAT Concession Supply beginning data cleaning project for Excel by requesting it at this link.*** The instructor guide contains the data set, solutions, and other information.

Give us about 5 – 8 days to respond – but check your Spam folder for the email if you do not see our email within that approximate time frame. (You may want to add drwendytietz@gmail.com to your Safe Senders list. Please don’t email to that email address – that is an email address used solely for distributing the project resources we have developed. Thank you!)

News flash: This data cleaning project is the first project in a set of ten data cleaning and visualization projects developed by Tracie Miller-Nobles, Jennifer Cainas, and me. We will be releasing new projects approximately twice a month for the remainder of 2022. These projects will be available in three levels: Beginner (five data cleaning techniques plus two-visualization dashboard); Intermediate (beginner steps with seven additional data cleaning techniques plus three-visualization dashboard); and Advanced (intermediate steps with additional data cleaning techniques plus four-visualization dashboard.) In addition, the projects will be available in four software tool combinations: Excel, Google Sheets, Tableau Prep combined with Tableau, and Alteryx combined with Power BI.