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Help HPU Students learn "Real World" Spreadsheet and Database skills

I'm teaching a database/spreadsheet course at HPU this fall
to accounting/management grad students as well as the odd computer
scientist, and I have all this boring sample data from the textbook
regarding fictional ice-cream companies. Pretty tedious stuff. I had
this idea to re-create the data based on the "The Office" so all the
accounts/salespeople names would be taken from the show.


What I'd also really love to do is get some actual XL/access data from
some real companies to show how this stuff gets done in the real world.
I don't suppose you know of anyone who might have
some business related data from a few years back that they would be
willing to share? I would totally anonymize all the data, but I would
love to see any business related XL or access files (hopefully in Office
2007). In fact I'd be interested to see any real accounting data from companies in any form - my hope is to connect the class with real world practice.


I realize that companies are very sensitive about their internal
book-keeping, but I was wondering if anonymized versions of accounts
from more than 2 years ago might be something someone was willing to
share with me for educational purposes.

Many thanks in advance
Sam Joseph, Ph.D.
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science
Hawaii Pacific University

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Comment by Brian on September 2, 2010 at 10:29pm
I like Boris' idea. Don't even tell them it's fishy. See if anyone notices.
Comment by Barry Weinman on August 28, 2010 at 9:30am
If you go to http://edgar.sec.gov/ you can request the quarterly and annual income statements for any public company. often they go back many years and can even include the original SEC filings when they went public. That shows their financial when they were private companies
Comment by Boris Ning on August 27, 2010 at 8:44pm

Just make sure they don't take their frustration out on you if they cannot complete their assignments.
Comment by Sam Joseph on August 27, 2010 at 8:20pm
Wow, some great suggestions - many thanks for the input. I'll have a detailed look.
Comment by Boris Ning on August 27, 2010 at 6:30pm
What if... you have them analyze fishy accounting without telling them what company it's from?

Enron:
http://caraellison.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/enronannualreport199...
http://caraellison.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/enronannualreport199...
http://caraellison.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/enronannualreport200...

Here's what I can grab off msn and google:
You can probably find other companies using the same sites

Yahoo:
http://moneycentral.msn.com/investor/invsub/results/statemnt.aspx?S...

Google:
http://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html

One of my friends used to use the Standard and Poor's execucomp database for financial research. There seems to be a lot of financial data there but I'm not sure if it'll suit your purposes. I've seen ways to connect to it through Microsoft access (and get gigabytes of data off of it). You might want to look into that.

Good luck!

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