Excel for Marketing Managers

Finding Maximum Area and Volume

Finding Max

Area and

Volume

Using the Application..............................................................................................................

For older students, the difficulty is in figuring out the formula that they need
to use. (Instead of the usual A = LW, they need to use A = W (100 – 2W) if the
given length of fencing is 100’ long, and W is the distance away from the barn.)
Once they plug that in, they can just look down the table to find the dimensions
that provide the greatest area. They can also do some exploring on their own
with different amounts of fence and then tabulate the results on paper and
pencil. They can then see if they can draw some conclusions about the ratio – is
there a conclusion they can reach about the proportions of a rectangle that
would give them the maximum amount of area.

Younger kids can use guessing and checking to come up with the correct
answer. You could produce this worksheet as a blank table and use it to guide
the students by placing it on an overhead projector and working on it as a
teacher-guided activity for the whole class. For these students, you may want
to concentrate on the pattern of numbers generated as they fill in the chart:
For each unit increase in the width, the length decreases by twice that unit.

Students could work in small groups or individually and, as each discovered
the correct answer to one part of the table, that answer could be put on the
spreadsheet and shown to the rest of the class.

You could set this up as a table that you provide to the students on paper,
which they would need to complete using paper and pencil or calculators. You
could also set this up as a spreadsheet, explain the process to the students, and

Note:

Once you have the answer for this version, you can feed in some exploratory
numbers to see if there is a relationship between the correct answer for this
problem and the appropriate answer for other similar problems. That is, is there a
basic relationship between width and length of a rectangle that maximizes the
area inside this rectangle?