A1) Creating an effective and efficient Excel worksheet can significantly help a retailer in various aspects. These aspects can be related to demand estimation and analysis, channel and store planning, human resource planning and also in scheduling inventory orders (The Planning Factory Ltd).
Creating automated systems in Excel for the above jobs in retailing business is commonly referred to as merchandise planning. Such an activity would help the retailer to schedule things more accurately and faster. This would result in significant time and cost savings.
In addition to savings due to faster planning and scheduling, there would be less wastage and savings from overhead expenses. It would also help the retailer to concentrate more on the core job of selling and marketing, thus indirectly benefitting him (The Planning Factory Ltd).
A2) While it is true that we are becoming a visual society and try to find details in a short cut manner through charts and graphs, it is neither practically feasible nor advisable to have a chart or a graph for every Excel sheet.
Creating a chart for every data may be cumbersome, take lot of effort and time, may not fully explain the information, may be hard to read and digest easily or confuse the reader regarding actual information (Thing, 2014).
There is some information which is best represented through text or table. The reason might be that the data is too large, or too sophisticated or the audience may be intelligent enough to comprehend the information directly without the use of visual graphics.
Also, as some information might have too many fields, it is not practically feasible to create a chart for such data, as the chart would have too many lines or bars, and the purpose of visualization will be lost (Thing, 2014).
Thus, the use of visual graphics should be done judicially taking into consideration the kind of data, the kind of audience and also the return on the effort required for creating such charts and graphs.
Works Cited
The Planning Factory Ltd. Are You Ready For Merchandise Planning. Web. <http://www.planfact.co.uk/are_you_ready_for_merchandise_planning.htm>.
Thing, Shuan. How to Not Create Junk Infographics. Piktochart Infographics. Web. 29 Oct. 2014. <http://piktochart.com/blog/how-to-not-create-junk-infographics/>.
