Business Intelligence with Power BI

L01 · From Data to Decision

Practice — Mild · Solution

Step-by-step

  1. Load. Get data → Text/CSV → l01_retail_2025.csv. The preview shows seven columns; OrderDate carries a calendar icon (date type) and Quantity/Revenue carry 123/decimal icons. Click Load — the file is clean, so Power Query is not needed.
  2. Card. Check Revenue in the Data pane, then choose the Card icon. It reads $20.66M; the underlying total is $20,663,252.72 across all 50,539 rows. No formula — an implicit measure summed the column.
  3. Bar chart. Empty canvas, check Revenue and Category, set the type to bar chart. Verified figures:
    CategoryRevenue
    Furniture$7,592,350.84
    Outdoor$5,553,568.57
    Kitchen & Dining$3,232,624.34
    Lighting$2,672,220.78
    Decor$1,612,488.19
  4. Slicer. Check Region, set the type to slicer. Selecting Southwest filters every visual: the card shows $1,758,462.06, and the bar chart re-ranks for the Southwest alone.
  5. Clear. The eraser icon in the slicer's header clears the selection; the card returns to $20.66M.

Common mistakes

  • Summing the wrong field. A card showing 79,572 has Quantity on it — a real number (total units sold in 2025), just not the one asked for.
  • A leftover filter. If the cleared page still shows $9.22M, the slicer cleared but a visual-level filter on Online survived. The Filters pane shows everything currently filtering a selected visual — check it when numbers refuse to return to baseline.

Reflection answers

  • Any step can be the slow one on day one; the fix is the same — do it again on a fresh file.
  • The recalculation is cross-filtering: a slicer selection filters every visual on the page at once.