I’m very excited to start learning Power BI, as it will be a requirement for my first placement. I haven’t had the change yet to start playing with it during our training as we’ve been very busy with Tableau and Alteryx, so I’m happy Andy gave us a challenge today to build our dashboard using Power BI!
The data set was from https://www.kaggle.com/ and it was about grocery store sales from a real grocery store. It came already pretty clean and organised. The only problem was that the numbers were not making much sense. There were lots of zeros and we could not figure out how the numbers were summing up.
I decided to create 3 calculations for my BANS without worrying too much about the zeros as I don’t even know what store the data belongs to. I calculated ‘Price buy x Units’, ‘Revenue’ (Price sell x Units) and ‘Profit’ (Revenue – Price buy x Units).
We didn’t have much time to explore all the possible analysis with the software, because today we had only up to 1 pm to finish everything: Understanding/organising the data, learning Power BI/building a dashboard and then writing this blog post.
It made it a bit annoying to use a tool for the first time in a rush because we could not find common features as quickly as it is in Tableau. A couple of very simple things I couldn’t figure out how to do, such as changing the name of my BAN from ‘Count of Transactions’ to ‘Total Transactions’, because the calculation I’m using is the count distinct of transactions.
After about 2 hours exploring Power BI while building a dashboard at the same time, I can say that it is pretty cool software and I’m excited to learn more about it.
It has a couple of features that makes things way easier than Tableau, for example, the floating sheets with the help of a ruler to keep things aligned in the dashboard. I’m not too fond of containers in Tableau as it never let me add changes where I want correctly and I always end up spending too much time moving things around trying to fit a new sheet somewhere Tableau doesn’t agree, apparently.
I did some research online for KPI dashboards and sketched a couple of BANS and graphs I thought would be interesting to have on my dashboard. After I was done I thought I could have added a percentage of profit per sales ratio but I didn’t have time. Here is the final result. Pretty good for a first time using the software, I would say.
