“Birthday Cake” is a way of combining Stacked Column Chart, shapes and images to, with a little extra formatting, get a graphic report reminiscent of a birthday cake with candles. It can be used e.g. to show the growth of income or profit of the company over a period of several years. This kind of chart is very easy to make, so if you want to attract the attention of bosses and colleagues, pay attention and follow the steps shown.
Before you decide to create a pivot table, ask yourself: do you really need it? This report groups and aggregates data (summation, averaging, counting, etc.) and you may have already done so in the source table; maybe it is, in itself, a report? If you do decide to take this step, you will need to adjust it so that the pivot table can process the data, because it requires that the records be in rows.
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.