Practice — Medium · Counting What Matters

Skills focus. Changing a field's summarization (sum → count distinct) · bar and line charts · reading a chart for its trough, not just its peak.

Ungraded. In-class or self-paced. Less scaffolding than Mild — the steps say what, you work out how.

Scenario

The operations manager does not care about dollars this morning — she staffs the warehouse and wants to know about order volume: how many orders came in, from where, and when the quiet months fall. Same file, different lens: l01_retail_2025.csv.

The one new move This practice needs a count of orders, and multiple rows can share one OrderID (one row per product in the order). Summing is wrong and plain counting double-counts. In the visual's field well, open the dropdown on OrderID and choose Count (Distinct) — count each order once, however many lines it has.

Tasks

Load l01_retail_2025.csv into a new file.
Build a card showing the number of distinct orders in 2025.
Build a bar chart of distinct orders by Region, largest on top. Which region takes the most orders? Which takes the fewest?
Build a line chart of Revenue by month. Ignore the peak this time — find the trough. Which month is the year's quietest, and roughly how much revenue did it bring in?
Sanity-check yourself: your order-count card and your revenue card from the lesson describe the same year. Divide one by the other in your head — is an average order of roughly $780–$790 believable for a home-goods retailer? (This habit — dividing two big numbers to see if their ratio is sane — will save you repeatedly in this course.)

Hint — my order count looks far too big

A count of 50,539 is the row count — you counted order lines. Open the field's dropdown in the field well and switch from Count to Count (Distinct).

Reflection

When would a business care about order count rather than revenue? Name two decisions each number drives.
February is the trough for revenue. Would you bet it is also the trough for order count? How would you check in under a minute?