Question

Create Dummy variables for the 12 months of the year.

Which months have the most substantial effect on Sales? Provide analysis output

Time	Sales
1	15
2	16
3	12
4	11
5	7
6	9
7	11
8	16
9	19
10	22
11	27
12	27
13	28
14	25
15	23
16	23
17	23
18	25
19	26
20	26
21	31
22	35
23	38
24	39

Answer 1

Question is pretty straightforward we just need to find out which months give the most sales and the sale figure is given for each time period.

Note that there are 24 time periods given and 12 months so basically the time period given should be for each half of the month.

So in the data the first and second sales figure add up for the sales of the first month , then the 3rd and 4th sales figure add up for the sales figure of second month and so on.

So we add up the sales figures in pairs of two and find the sales figure for each months. Since we dont know whether the time given starts with January we just say it is month 1 and so on.

Now we can make a column/bar chart on the Monthly sales column and make easy comparison between months..

To do this in Excel just select the column for monthly sales and insert a column chart from the insert tab.

Now we can clearly see that the month 12 give highest sales followed by months 11 , 6 7 and 10 respectively. (Higher the bar higher the sales)

So months 12,11,6,7 and 10 have substantial effect on sales while months 1 ,2,3,4 have the least effect.

Excel output attached below . Hope this question is now easy for you. Happy learning.