Few important terms used in the context of self-service analytics and BI tools.
Data Connection, Data Source, Data Set, blah blah blah in the context of Self-Service Analytics & BI – Bringing clarity to chaos.
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Calculating product of values in a column in SQL and its business usecase
SQL supports most aggregate functions except one fundamental aggregation to calculate product of values in a column. If you are wondering what could be a scenario where you may have to calculate product of values in a column, here is a business scenario that demands it. Business Scenario: For the sake of brevity, let's say... Continue Reading →
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Why is SQL one of the most powerful tools in the arsenal of an Analyst?
Out of information analysis, comes wisdom. It’s this information analysis that is one of the important reasons that created the need for storage of data. The world of databases was sprouted to address this need of data storage and many languages were born to interact and deal with the data stored in these databases. But... Continue Reading →
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Office Scripts: Is it the beginnings of the end of VBA era?
It has been quite some time now a lot of talk around the future of VBA. Here comes the Office Scripts in Microsoft Office web apps like Excel (in its preview) with two important features to seed the beginnings of the end of VBA era: Actions recorder: Mimicking VBA macro recorder functionality Automation scripting: Mimicking... Continue Reading →
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Infographic of Table Merge or Join Operations
Most data analyses start with organizing the data, at least starting with organizing in tabular format. This implies tables are the most fundamental formats to deal when analysing data. Here I crafted an infographic showing the most commonly performed merge or join operations among tables. Hope you will find this useful. Feel free to share... Continue Reading →
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Cascading or dependent drop-down lists using Data Validation tool in Excel
If you are thinking of bringing interactivity to the reports in Excel, you may have come across the need for having a simple drop-down list or a more complex cascading drop-down list (i.e., a drop-down list whose values are dependent on the value already selected in another drop-down). Example Scenario: For example, say, you have... Continue Reading →
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Calculating Age (duration or difference between two dates) in years, months and days in Power Query M Script
16-Jul turns out to be the birthday of Microsoft Power BI. Here I post a formula in M Script to calculate the age (i.e., duration or difference between two dates) in years, months and days: let Source= [ PowerBIBDay = #date(2014, 7, 16), Today = Date.From(DateTime.LocalNow()), BirthdayFactor = if Date.DayOfYear(PowerBIBDay)<Date.DayOfYear(Today) then 0 else 1, DayFactor... Continue Reading →
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A magical Excel trick for flattening data copied from a PivotTable report in tabular layout into usable format
Here is a scenario that I come across sometime ago when I received an Excel file with some apparently messy data for further processing to generate another report. The data in the file appear similar to below screenshot. This data is self-explanatory. It’s the sales in units and dollars of each product under each product... Continue Reading →
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Flash Fill Trick in Excel 2016
Here is a very common exercise that you might have or may come across – You have full names of employees in a column and you are expected to extract last names from these full names into a separate column. In versions prior to Excel 2013, you need to use formulas and functions to accomplish... Continue Reading →
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New function in Excel 2016 to display in a cell, the formula contained in another cell
You must have come across a number of situations when you were trying to explain a formula that you have written in Excel and the result of the formula. This kind of situation basically demands both the formula expression and the formula result to be displayed simultaneously. For example, from the below screenshot, if you... Continue Reading →
