IPA IP 2025 Question 22
A question IPA Japan published in 令和7年度 ITパスポート試験 公開問題 問22, translated into English. ITPEC is based on the same exams.
Mr. A in the sales department wants to aggregate the sales forecasts and actual results submitted by each salesperson every month and turn them into graphs, so that the sales performance of the ten (10) salespersons can be understood at a glance. Which of the following is the most appropriate technology or tool to be applied to solve this problem?
Explanation
Office tools that process the input data and present it — totalling ten people's monthly figures and drawing graphs is spreadsheet work.
The data here is small and already entered by people: each salesperson submits a forecast and an actual result every month. What Mr. A needs is to collect those figures, total them per person and per month, and show them as graphs so the performance can be seen at a glance. Office tools such as spreadsheet software do exactly this: the figures are entered or pasted into a sheet, functions aggregate them, and the chart function turns them into graphs. It is the simplest tool that solves the problem, without any new system.
Answer (c)
Why not others:
- •(a) — AI that learns from data is for prediction or classification; there is nothing to learn here, only aggregation and charting
- •(b) — IoT collects data automatically from sensors and devices, but these figures are submitted by the salespersons, not measured
- •(d) — data science analyses big data with statistical and machine-learning methods; ten people's monthly figures are not big data and need no advanced analysis
Key rule: Fit the tool to the size of the problem: aggregating and graphing a small set of manually entered figures is a job for office tools such as a spreadsheet.
System Strategy · AI-written, may contain errors
This question comes from the past questions IPA Japan publishes, translated into English by ITPEC Practice. ITPEC Practice is an independent study tool and is not affiliated with IPA or ITPEC. See the original paper (PDF) or Report an issue.