Creating a dimension/fact reference for PowerBI - excel

Hey everyone I'm sort of new to this. I need some help on establishing a connection to a value in powerbi.
Example:
Daily data contains store type such as
Drive up, food truck, sit down.
Reference needs to show how many sub categories in
Drive up - cash register x2
Drive up - door
Food truck - cash register
Ultimately I would like to show how many registers I would need based on how many store types are there.Im not sure how to design the fact or dimension sheet.
I hope this makes sense.
TIA TC
I tried column 1 as the store type and column 2 as the item

Related

Inventory management - find employees with two OR more particular devices

I am managing the inventory of stock for an IT company.
Recently we've had to dole out lots of new iPhones as the old iPhones assigned to employees were incompatible with a particular piece of software.
With most employees working from home and IT staff being split into several different offices it can be a little difficult to co-ordinate things and make sure that the staff member who received a replacement iPhone actually sent back the original one!
It would be great to have an easy means of check for staff who have two (or possibly more) iPhones (any type) so that I can contact them and ask them to return the old device.
I can export the data from the SQL-based equipment database to Excel and analyse it but I don't have the experience to make things more automatic (and build a report).
Here is an example of the database (shown as an Excel file).
In this example case, John Murphy, has got two iPhones. He only needs one of them. Items with the "Employee_Name" set to "IT Service" and have the status set to 'With helpdesk' are in order and do not need to be included in the final report.
'Tammy Top' has only one iPhone and therefore mustn't appear in the report.
Thanks for your help!
UPDATE...
I've played around with Pivot Tables a little... it may be a start. Perhaps if someone is more experienced they could suggest a better way of setting up the values for the pivot table?
I am pretty sure, that there are better solutions.
But at the moment, I can offer you the following:
E2: =IF(AND(A2="IT Service", D2="With helpdesk"),0,COUNTIFS($A$2:$A2,A2,$D$2:$D2,D2))
G2: =FILTER(A2:D6,(E2:E6>1),"")
In column E I used a COUNTIFS formula to check how often an Employee_Name has occured until now. I wrapped it in an IF statement, that checks whether the combination of "IT Service" and "With helpdesk" occured. In that case, it would override the counter with 0.
In column G I used a FILTER formula to provide the relevant rows (A to D) of the source area in case the counter is higher than 1.
Seeing as the data is in SQL Server, just query the database instead of mucking around in Excel.
Something like:
SELECT Employee_Name FROM <table> GROUP BY Employee_Name WHERE COUNT(*) > 1 AND Employee_Name <> 'IT Service'
Should get a list of Employees with more than one phone. To get the full list something like:
SELECT * FROM <table> WHERE Employee_Name IN (
SELECT Employee_Name FROM <table> GROUP BY Employee_Name WHERE COUNT(*) > 1 AND Employee_Name <> 'IT Service')
should get you the list you want.
being the name of the table/view/SP that is generating the data you are importing into Excel.

Pros and cons of two types of PivotTables for BI purposes

I am trying to figure out how to create the most useful PivotTable for a user to view data for BI purposes. Here are two options I was considerating:
(1) Traditional PivotTable, pivot values on top:
(2) Drill-down type PivotTable:
What are the pros and cons of each method? For example, one for each to start might be:
Drilldown
PRO: trivial to add additional drilldown variables.
Pivot:
PRO: can easily sort by the column headers in the table UI.
And, are there any other possible tabular displays of data, either another type of PivotTable or another type altogether?
I'll suggest to keep it simple. If the objective is to present a view of the revenue figures of each region summarized by gender then pivot table in option 1 is the most effective of both, as it shows everything relevant in one simple look, keeping similar data at the same level making easier to compare.
Bear in mind that management requested that view to be able to effectively see how each region is performing on that specific category.
If the focus is revenue by different gender. Option 1 shows that in same row continuously for each region. It can easily be seen that the best performer on revenue generated by females is US, while best performer on revenue generated by males is Canada. While is not easy to see that in option 2.
If the focus is revenue by same gender. Option 1 shows that in same column continuously, which is not the case with option two.
Option 2 will be useful if the primary focus is set on revenue by region then if there is a need to see additional details based on the performance of any region management can drilldown to see the details of what makes the primary number. Which in this case is not the objective as the request is to show both.
Also best advice is to always agree requirements with clients (internal and/or external) you might find that they might have requested only what they believe it is possible to achieve and after they have that they will apply some "manual steps" to achieve their ultimate goal, something you could have done entirely if only you would have known.
Pivot Tables are used to -
summarize data
analyze data
explore data
present summary data
Both ways (traditional and drill down) of Pivot table can do the above listed.
It depends on what you want to achieve in BI.
If detailed data is not required to show or sort then you can use drill down.
Mostly in BI, data used in summarised form. So Drill down method will be good for display of data. Anyways you can double click and see the detailed data. See how to get details of drill
Drill Down:
a. Pros
Summarise Easily
Add sub points for summary
"Get Details" of Pivot for more details
b. Cons
The way you are doing sorting by pivot is not possible. Instead I would suggest to use pivot to drill down. So you can sort (And will move to Pros section :P) and check pivot details in another form.
Traditional Way
This way you are making to use pivot tables of your data. You should explore more in given links below.
5 pivot tables you probably haven't seen before
pivot tables save your job
23 things you should know about Excel pivot tables
Generally every representation of data has a purpose and with this purpose there come certain advantages and disadvantages.
Obviously with any kind of report, the audience matters most. Which would put you in the classical Requirement Analysis situation where you need to figure out what your customer wants (What data is of interest? How should it be sliced? What medium is it consumed on?)
Is the Revenue by Gender an important KPI?
If it is not, why including it at all?
If it is, let's see what a potential reader would do to answer a question like "How does the womens sale for Mexico compare with Canada?"
Drill down table:
Understanding the table will take a couple of second since they have to understand the different levels and their representation, the meaning of the bold and regular lines and realize that the man and women values accumulate to the total value for a region
Find Mexico in the list
Find the row for women and the value of it on the right
Find Canada in the list
Find the row for women and the value of it on the right
Remember the the value for Mexico or look it up again
Important here is also that this process will be repeated more or less exactly for every follow up question.
Traditional table
Understanding the table will be faster, they see a country name on the left and male/female on the top. Generally people are used to these tables since primary school and won't need further explanation.
Find Mexico in the list, go to the right until they find the value for women (if you try it you will see that you automatically see the values and the heading)
Find Canada in the list, (realize that it is only one line above) go to the right and have both values on top of each other.
For all the following questions the structure is easy to remember and it's a find and match game between rows and columns
I know that might be a bit subjective, but I hope the general idea is understandable
If you know have a question like "In which region do we sell more to men than women?" the advantage of a traditional over a drill down table becomes even more obvious.
With the drill down you will have to juggle several rows and their values while with the traditional you just skim through one column and look for the biggest value.
Is the Revenue per Region the main KPI?
You should then rather use a drill down table, possibly with additional levels (ie. North America in case it's international data or US State since I would assume it would be of interest if your product sells better in Alaska than Florida).
Your audience can then decide which granularity they want to see and adjust it accordingly. The gender is on the bottom of the hierarchy so either you have curious people who are interested in just another figure or they don't care and just don't drill down that deep.
The assumption here is that you deliver the table on the highest aggregate level.
One could argue that the same problem of finding row etc. exists as well for this case but I would assume you wouldn't necessarily compare the sales for Yucatán with Alberta so you stay in one group of states for example and again just have to skim up or down to find the states of the same country so you can compare it.
Using drilldowns in pivot tables is, in my opinion, a tool to be used by analysts, and not managers. Pivot tables are not quite intuitive enough to be used on reports that are being sent on for BI review by management. Typically any report which is being circulated for review by the powers that be should be consistent from user to user. That means using drilldowns would display different numbers if different items are selected - which could lead to 2 people talking about different values without knowing it.
Many people in management level positions outside of the core analytical group will still print anything you e-mail them before they look at it. I suspect that this is more likely to be true in a less technologically advanced company (ie: one which uses Excel as its database analysis tool instead of a full ERP-type system). In either case, anything being submitted for high level review should already be formatted exactly as you want them to see it.
The key in Excel deliverables within the workbplace is to make review as easy as possible. That means all necessary information should be immediately visible on each tab, with a minimum of scrolling (maybe scrolling down if necessary, but never scrolling right), and absolutely no clicking required.
Conclusion - Do not force a reviewer to manipulate your Excel file to use it
You may like drilldowns because you see how powerful it is to adjust reports as you are analyzing data - but once you have made your own analytical conclusions, those conclusions should be immediately apperent from the visible workspace that you leave for review.
Therefore, in order to achieve simplicity in high level review documents, you should use the 'traditional' format as you have shown it, which shows all numbers next to eachother in an easy to read table.

Showing unique values in a column along with another value associated with each

I have an Excel table containing transactions of companies. It looks like this:
Customer Phone Item Price
==================================
Company1
Company2
Company1
Company3
Company1
I need to see the unique values of customer column.
The result I want is:
Customer Phone Item Price
==================================
Company1
Company2
Company3
Here is what I tried already:
Remove duplicates: To just get the unique values, I can use the remove duplicates of excel. However, since this is something I will be doing frequently, I would rather not have to make a copy of the table each time in order to delete duplicates.
Pivot table: A pivot table does this job perfectly. My problem here is that I need other column info as well (e.g., the phone number) which I want to appear in the column next to the company. [I haven't yet figured out how to do this in a pivot table (i.e., to show a value as text instead of sum or count etc.)] - This would be the best option for me.
As long as you don't have a super long table where the recalculation will kill you, you could just add a calculated column like this and then filter on value being 1:
=IF(COUNTIF($B$1:B2,"=" & B3) > 0,0,1)
If recalculation is an issue, you can use the same or similar method with VBA except paste static values.
PivotTables are well suited for this kind of stuff, so that'd be my first go-to, but PivotTables are also frustratingly difficult to adapt to uses beyond their envisioned use... so there's a steep decline in their usefulness as you stray from that.
Ultimately, you may want to consider a relational database paradigm, and/or using Access. That's one step up the sophistication ladder towards managing the kind of data you're talking about.

Excel Management for Inventory

Okay, hope this question will be clear enough that I can get an answer. Thanks for the help.
The situation is that I am downloading some information into two different spreadsheets which contains orders from two different stores.
The problem is that between these two stores the model numbers (SKU#) for a lot of items are different even though the product is the same. There is no changing that now. I do have a list of equivalencies. For example, I know that 00-XX-55 is the same in Store 1 as 22-FF-33. There isn't a logical equivalency so I would be setting them manually.
My question is if there is any way I can combine data from two sheets and set up manual equivalencies while doing this? Would excel allow me to manage the data in that way I can join the two unequal SKUs
You need a two-column translation table. Once you have this you can manage combined inventory because you can then determine the total inventory of a single item in both stores.
So in a solution do you want to translate all to the store 1 sku, the store 2 sku, or a third warehouse sku? I guess what I am driving at here is that there needs to be a superior synonym to sort of design around.
To build a translation table you would put the original sku (the sku that you will convert from, sort of the inferior number you do not want to go by for purposes of the summarization) into column A and the master sku into column B. We will call this sheet "converter".
You could either have:
A, B
00-XX-55, 22-FF-33
This could normalize everything to the 22- sku. Or you could do this:
A, B
00-XX-55, 123abc
22-FF-33, 123abc
This way if you want to normalize to a third value rather than either of the stores values.
In your inventory page col C is the sku column so in column D put =iferror(vlookup(C, converter!A:B, 2, false), C) and populate that all the way down. Now in each row you have the original and the master sku next to each other in C and D. If the sku was not found in the converter table then it would just use whatever value was in C. You can then build pivots tables using D to group them on.

Looking up values from different tables including newly found values

I have several documents which contain statistical data of performance of companies. There are about 60 different excel sheets representing different months and I want to collect data into one big table. Original tables looks something like this, but are bigger:
Each company takes two rows which represent their profit from the sales of the product and cost to manufacture the product.I need both of these numbers.
As I said, there are ~60 these tables and I want to extract information about Product2. I want to put everything into one table where columns would represent months and rows - profit and costs of each company. It could be easily done (I think) with INDEX function as all sheets are named similarly. The problem I faced is that at some periods of time other companies enter the market:
Some of them stay, some of them fail. I would like to collect information on all companies that exist today or ever existed, but newly found companies distort the list (in second picture we see, that company BA is in 4th row, not BB). As row of a company changes from time to time, using INDEX becomes problematic, because in some cases results of different companies get into one row. Adjusting them one by one seems very painful.
Maybe there is some quick and efficient method to solve such problem?
Any help or ideas would be appreciated.
One think you may want to try is linking the Excel spreadsheets as tables in Access. From there you can create a query that ties the tables together. As data changes in the spreadsheets, the query will reflect those changes.

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