Hello!

Welcome everyone.
My name is Dany Hoter,
I'm a Senior Program Manager in the Excel team.
And this course is about,
it's an introduction to data analysis using Excel.
It's a part of series of courses that we are recording and
making available.
The first one we did was called Analyzing and
Visualizing Data in Excel.
And you can search for it,
my recommendation will be to take this one.
Unless you are very familiar with this content,
you can jump right away to the second one.
Otherwise, take this one and
then continue to the next course, and I will
mention the next course also in the continuation of this course.
So in this course I'm gonna play two roles.
I'm gonna be myself, I'm gonna be the Dany,
the Excel Program Manager,
explaining things about Excel and how to use it.
And I'm gonna be another Dany,
which is a business person in a company that is
selling bicycles and selling components for
bicycles and clothing for bicycles in different countries.
And the role of me as Dany the business person
is to present the sales information and
the company to a new sales manager that we have.
Her name is Lucy, and she is new to the company, and
I was asked to introduce her to the company sales so that she
would be able to understand what we are all about.
And probably make decisions based on this data as
she goes on to go forward.
And if I switch to my machine and,
this is actually what I was thinking of presenting for her.
So I was thinking of taking some aspects, along some axis,
along the year, show sales by year for
each category of product that we sell.
Sales by country and sales by product category altogether.
Different types of charts
to show the performance of our company.
And in order to do that,
I approach a third person in our company called Jack.
He's my friend in IT.
And he usually is the person I'm going to
get the numbers I need to create reports usually.
So I explained to Jack what I need and
this is what he sent me.
Summary data, according to what I was asking, by year and
category, by country and year, and just by category.
Which could be the basis for these three charts that I was
attempting to include in my report.
So as I get these numbers in Excel,
I was thinking of inserting the charts.
I go to insert chart and I see that there is something
that looks promising called, insert recommend the chart.
So just before we go forward,
I would just mention something about the version I'm using.
I'm using Excel 2016.
I'm using Excel 2016, coming from Office 365,
as a subscriber.
So I have all the features that were
released with Office 2016 or Excel 2016.
Plus some additional ones that I will point to as we go forward,
that were delivered after the release of Office 2016.
If you use earlier versions like 2013 or 2010,
you'll be perfectly fine, you will find almost all,
everything I'm showing here, maybe a few things here and
there you will not find in your version.
I will try to point to them, but
other than that you'll be fine using these other versions.
So, recommended charts.
I'm parking here, in the general area of this data, and
I'm looking at the recommended charts.
I see that there is one chart, there is another.
This looks interesting.
Like showing me a stack of the sales.
But I see that I have the right information, only it's reversed.
I have, each column represents a category, and
I wanted each column to represent a year and to see
the composition of the cells for the year for the category.
So I can go here to switch between rows and columns, and
now it actually shows me a column for each year and
the categories as different colors,
which looks exactly what I wanted.
I go the second set, insert, recommend the chart,
I park here, I insert the chart.
And this is actually showing me the columns for
each year within each country.
So we see the trend, year to year trend.
I see that, for example,
in Australia there was some drop of sales year to year,
while in other countries we are doing much better.
At least sales are growing.
Which is something that probably Lucy would be very interesting
to understand better.
And the last part is, again,
I'm gonna use insert and recommend the charts.
And here, my initial plan was to use a pie chart, which is a good
way to visualize these numbers that add up together to
the 100%, sales by accessories, sales by bikes, and by clothing.
So this is the general idea of the report I was
planning to show Lucy, in order for the introduction.
And I went with this to Lucy, to show her the numbers and
the charts.
And to tell you, to be frank with you, I wasn't really,
this was not really a big success with her.
She was happy about the total numbers, but
she immediately had more questions about more details and
different ways to represent the data and to show the data.
She was interested in data by sub-category and
not just by category.
She was interested in profitability, and not just by
the sales number, because we might be selling a lot,
but maybe the profit is not there.
And also, she wanted to understand a lot more about
the customers, like what ages are they.
Can we bucket the customers by age group, and
report by age groups?
So she had tons and tons of other questions.
So each time she wanted something,
I actually had to go back to my buddy Jack in IT and ask him for
a different set of summary numbers.
So by the fifth time I actually went through this exercise, Jack
kind of got tired of preparing the numbers again and again,
he told me look, I can see that what you need is something else.
I will prepare for you a set of the detailed data of the sales
of these three years, and I will, using this detailed data,
you will be able to create any kind of
report of summaries that you want.
And you can show different aspects of the business.
And more than that, you will be able to give it to Lucy,
and explain to her how she can use the data to create
the summaries she wants.
The different comparisons on different axis, and so on,
based on this set of data.
And if this is gonna work out, we can produce new sets of data
with the same kind of detail going forward, and
this is the way we can monitor the performance going forward.
And so this is what we're going to do.
I'm waiting for the detailed data to come.
And just one more advise that Jack gave me,
as he's pretty knowledgeable about using Excel,
is that what you really need is to create pivot tables and
to use also Excel tables.
I knew a little bit about pivot tables,
Excel tables was something I didn't know about.
So, this is something I will have to look at.
And so I'm waiting for the detailed data, and
we'll see you in the next part, when we receive the data and
start exploring it using pivot tables and tables.