420 Tableau Assignment 1: Data Analysis and Visualization Project

This assignment solution analyzes sales data using Tableau, addressing questions about product category performance, sales trends over time, and product/service quality based on returns. The analysis compares sales to forecasts, identifying products that are performing well or poorly. It examines how sales have changed over time for different products, explaining potential reasons for these trends. The solution also assesses which region receives the highest quality products/service, using returns as an indicator. The assignment includes charts to substantiate the responses and provides a summary of the findings. The analysis highlights trends where sales and targets are generally aligned, with variations across product categories. It notes changes in sales over time for certain products and identifies regional differences in product quality based on returns data. The solution also includes references to relevant literature supporting the analysis and findings.

Running head: 420 1
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Step 4: Answer the following questions by analyzing the data in Tableau. Create at least one
chart per question to substantiate your response:
A) How do the sales of the various product categories compare to forecasts (targets)?
Identify products that are doing particularly well/poorly.
From the results, both sales of product categories and targets are in the same trend with
targets being slightly higher than the sales. For instance, computers have the highest sales
as well as the targets while video players recorded the lowest sales as well as the lowest
targets. In other words, video players and audio are among products not doing well given
that they have registered the lowest sales and targets in general while computers, TVs and
cameras are doing quite well given that they have the highest sales and targets in general,
(Nair, Shetty, & Shetty, 2016).
B) How have the sales of the various products changed over time - have they increased,
decreased, or remained unchanged? What could explain these trends?
From the charts below, sales of the products to some extent have demonstrated slight
changes with some increasing time like tablets while some decreasing with time like blue
ray. However, greater part of the products tends not to change in their sales, (Hoelscher,
& Mortimer, 2018). Reason can be attributed by the fact that their same targets of
customers who buy same quantity of the products with time, (Deepak, & Jeyakumar,
2019).

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C) Assuming that returns are indicative of product and service quality (where high returns
indicate low quality), which region is receiving the highest quality products/service?

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From the chart above, Europe is the region receiving the highest quality products/service
given that it records the highest returns followed by Asia pacific while North America seems to
be the region that is receiving the lowest quality products/service given the fact that it has
recorded the lowest returns among other regions, (Pati, & Avinash, 2016).
Step 4
In summary, both sales of product categories and targets are in the same trend with
targets being slightly higher than the sales. In addition, sales of the products to some extent have
demonstrated slight changes with some increasing time like tablets while some decreasing with
time like blue ray. However, greater part of the products tends not to change in their sales. In
addition, Europe is the region receiving the highest quality products/service given that it records
the highest returns followed by Asia pacific while North America seems to be the region that is
receiving the lowest quality products/service given the fact that it has recorded the lowest returns
among other regions.

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References
Deepak, R. K. A., & Jeyakumar, S. (2019). Marketing management. Educreation Publishing.
Hoelscher, J., & Mortimer, A. (2018). Using Tableau to visualize data and drive decision-
making. Journal of Accounting Education, 44, 49-59.
Nair, L., Shetty, S., & Shetty, S. (2016). Interactive visual analytics on Big Data: Tableau vs D3.
js. Journal of e-Learning and Knowledge Society, 12(4).
Pati, D., & Avinash, A. (2016). Effective Data Visualization using Tableau. International
Journal of Engineering and Management Research (IJEMR), 6(5), 306-313.