Improving Decision Making: Using a Spreadsheet to Evaluate Hardware and Software Options

Software skills: Spreadsheet (Excel) basic formulaBusiness skills: Technology pricing

You will use Excel to calculate the cost of desktop systems, printers, and software. You are also required to apply any related basic Excel function to help you to make a good decision regarding Software/Hardware purchasing for your organization.

Use the Internet to obtain pricing information on hardware and software for an office of 30 people. You will need to price 30 PC desktop systems (monitors, computers, and keyboards) manufactured by Lenovo, Dell and HP (For the purpose of assignment, ignore the fact that desktop systems usually come with preloaded software packages). You are also need to obtain pricing on 15 desktop printers manufactured by HP, Canon and Dell.

Please also obtain pricing on 30 copies of the most recent versions of Microsoft office and Apache OpenOffice (formerly Oracle Open Office) and on 30 copies of Microsoft Windows 10. Each productivity package should contain programs for word processing, spreadsheets, database, and presentations. Prepare spreadsheet showing your research results for the software and the desktop system, printer, and software combination offering the best performance and pricing per-worker. Because every two workers share one printer (15 printers/30 systems), your calculations should assume only half a printer cost per worker.

Please use Tableau software to present your data visualization of the analysis findings. Write a report.