The inventory of goods is a boring but necessary activity that must be carried out, at least once a year, by all those who deal with sales. I have written before how to make an inventory of fixed assets. The inventory of goods is done in a similar way, but this time I will show how this is achieved by applying the technique of data consolidation. Excel has had this option for at least 10 years, so I believe it will be useful for each user.
Power Query allows you, whether you use Excel or Power BI, to connect to numerous data sources, retrieve, transform, and use “refined” data to create reports. On that occasion, each step in the transformation process is recorded and, when you refresh the link to the source, the steps are repeated in the given order and you get tables of identical structure. What is a purpose of Dataflows?
It is often possible to see one or more points on the visuals that deviate from the normal distribution of the series. Recently, Power BI Desktop was given the Analyze option (at the time of publishing this text it is still in the experimental version) which allows insight into what is happening with the data, comparing the shares or absolute values of the series.
If we analyze the chart visuals, we can often notice points with disturbances on them. These can be e.g. days when unexpected sales values occurred, completely contrary to the planned trend. Power BI Desktop, in the visuals’ Analytics section, now has the Find Anomalies option that allows it to find points on the chart that are inconsistent with trends and point to them.
When creating a report, the rule that less is better often applies. That is, instead of displaying everything with one visual, it is often a better tactic to create several smaller ones so that, by applying filters, you choose which of the data will be displayed. From now on, this procedure has been further simplified by introducing the Small Multiples option. It allows you to split one chart into several smaller ones based on a given dimension.