Level 1 - Importing and Analyzing Data for Johnson Equipment

Johnson Equipment, the medium-sized laboratory equipment manufacturing company where you work, is in the process of acquiring Sloan Manufacturing, a smaller equipment manufacturer in the same industry. Because operations between your company and overlap, you need to merge the data from the new company with similar data for you company. The text file you received from Sloan contains categories, product numbers and product descriptions, in addition to the on-hand quantity for each product and number of products produced during each month of the past year. You need to add prefixes to the category names so the data will match the existing data that your company uses. Then, you will use Excel to organize and summarize the data.

Complete the following:

1. Use Notepad (or another text editor) to open the text file named Sloan.txt from the Chapter 7 folder to examine the data, and then close the file and Notepad.

2. Import the text from the Sloan text file into a new workbook. Name the workbook Johnson-Sloan.xlsx and save it in the Chapter 7 folder. Rename Sheet1 as Imported Data.

3. Convert the information in the worksheet into columns, if necessary.

4. Sort the data by category and then by product number in ascending order.

5. Use the CONCATENATE function to add the appropriate prefix and a dash to each category in a new column titled CategoryPrefix using the following list. For example, the Analyzer category would begin with 600, followed by a dash and the category name (600-Analyzer). (Hint: Try placing these values in your spreadsheet in a column named Prefix using a VLOOKUP function.) Delete the original Category column.