New marketing hires are often told things such as, “We have a list of people who requested a free trial subscription. Are any of them on our list of inactive customers? If so, we’d like to direct them to an enhanced offer.” The purpose of this active-learning assignment is to give students the skills necessary to perform list management tasks such as these using Microsoft Excel. The exercise uses Excel rather than relational databases for two reasons: (1) Excel is commonly available, and (2) Excel is powerful and flexible enough to accomplish these list management tasks, even for lists as large as one million people.
– Eric DeRosia