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Hi Ken,
I’m sitting the APM exam in September and have a quick question if that’s okay.
Given that all strategic exams are computer based now i’m wondering if when i use the excel facility in the exam i can simply put my workings in 1 cell wherever possible. For instance if i was to calculate the Gross Profit margin of a company to show my workings i could simply select a cell and type =200/1000*100 in order to get a 20% result. Would this be acceptable to the examiner or would i have to put my workings in a different cell?
Thanks
Henry
I really do not know how that would be regarded in APM. However, your approach is bad spreadsheet design as it makes ‘what-if’ queries more difficult eg if sales change. Generally it is better to keep input data and assumptions separate from calculations.
Easier to see in an example where profit is 20% of sales. You could put a row for profit like 1000 * 0.2, 1200 * 0.2 etc where 1000 and 1200 are ghe seles for Jan and Feb.
However, if you then had to explore the effect of changing the GP% to 21% you would have to go through each month and change 0.2 to 0.21.
Better to place 0.2 in cell A1 (say) then your sales in B2, B3 etc then profits in C2 as B2*A1 and 3 as B3*A1 etc. Now if GP% changes, you just need to alter A1 and that change will flow through the spreadsheet.
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