🧠 Lab Insight
There are many reasons to forecast a company's future performance:
- A company may need to forecast sales to plan for production capacity
- It may forecast cash flow to manage financing needs
- Investors may forecast earnings to assess a company’s value
In this lab, your goal is to use Tableau’s forecasting options to:
- Forecast future quarterly sales for IBM
- Forecast future quarterly income before extraordinary items for IBM
- Visualize trends for 2022, 2023, and 2024, based on historical data from 2010–2021
This is your first hands-on exercise using Tableau to perform predictive analytics — a critical skill in today’s accounting and business environments.
🖥️ Getting StartedYou are going to need to have tableu installed on your desktop as well (NO MAC COMPUTERS ONLY WINdows)
📎 Submission Instructions
- Complete your forecasting analysis in Tableau
- Take screenshots of the following:
- Forecast chart for quarterly sales (both Box plots and Crosstab data)
- Forecast chart for quarterly income before extraordinary items (both Box plots and Crosstab data)
- Paste your screenshots into a Word document and name the document "Data Analytics #5 Submission".
- Add your write-up at the end of the Word file (see below)
- Submit your Word file only via Canvas
❌ Do not submit Tableau files ✅ Only Word documents with screenshots will be accepted 📂 All raw data and assignment materials are available on this Canvas page
📝 Short Write-Up Requirement (Max 300 Words)
At the end of your Word document, please include a short write-up that addresses the following questions:
- Did you notice any similarities between Data Analytics #5 (Tableau) and Data Analytics #3 (Excel)?
- Both assignments involve forecasting IBM’s sales and earnings. How did the experience compare?
- What are the differences between using Tableau and Excel for forecasting?
- In terms of ease of use, features, visualization, and interpretability
- What are the pros and cons of each tool?
- Think about the strengths and weaknesses you experienced while working on both
✅ Keep your response under 300 words ✅ Use bullet headers or paragraph breaks for each question ❌ Submissions that do not clearly answer each part will receive zero credit, even if the content is correct