As a data analyst and a data science enthusiast, the importance of the portfolio cannot be over-emphasized. It is a well-known fact that portfolios are one of the most vital ways to showcase and improve our skills. Having learned some data analysis tools for months, I believe the best way for me to demonstrate and access my skills is by working on a real-life scenario and data. However, I was skeptical about how to navigate the complex data. I doubted for several days if I was good enough to analyze large data sets. When meditating at the eleventh hour of the day, a thought just popped up in me; a thought of how far I have come, a thought of how rough my learning journey has been. I remember how acquaintances have critiqued me for always being on my laptop; then, I said if I don’t kill this doubt, then this doubt might kill me. I made up my mind immediately to not only analyze a large dataset but also to kill it, which I did.
I felt intense and fulfilled, having killed my doubt and fear. So I go to kaggle.com (an online dataset platform) to find a large dataset. After perusing kaggle datasets, I decided to go with a sale dataset because I believe it will provide insight on how an organization can evaluate its product performance as well as implement marketing and sales strategies for organizational growth. I downloaded my data in CSV format and imported it into Microsoft Excel. And so the journey begins!
After taking a good look at the data, I set my goals and objectives for my analysis. My first steps in data preprocessing and cleaning were to remove the duplicate data and then work with the date. I tried changing the date in the date and time format to day, month, and year format, but I kept getting invalid results, till I decided to split the date using text to column. Oh my gosh! It took me 45 minutes to combine the day, month, and year together. Yes, I'm referring to a regular date!I tried several methods I knew, even the concatenate formula, so many times and wondered what went wrong. Poor me! But, honestly, that is the beauty of analytics, the grit to be persistent. After a series of youtube videos, I got to know the Day() &"/"&month&"/"&year() method. Did I kill the date? Oh yes! I did. Oh my baddest! I thought to myself.Thank God for YouTube. I meticulously cleaned up the remaining data and deleted the unnecessary ones.After cleaning the data and transforming it to my taste, creating a pivot table and analyzing it using Vlookup and match functions was such a smooth ride for me. At some point, I got lost in Vlookup. Thank God for my friend, Youtube. I got to learn the combination of index and match function through her.
Communicating my results and finding them through the dashboard was not really an uphill task for me. I have always believed that creating a compelling and interactive dashboard is the beauty of analytics and is beyond design. So, I tried to communicate my findings and results in such a simple and attractive way. However, another challenge I encountered in the dashboard was linking the slicers to all the charts. Thank God for my friend YouTube. She came through for me again. This project is published on Github (https://github.com/Awaitingprof/sale_project).
This, my first project portfolio experience, has revealed to me the need to be pragmatic and to work more on projects. A portfolio will expose us to what we don’t know and what we thought we knew but haven’t put into practice, so a portfolio is a must have. Hencefore, I will be putting my skills into practice by working more on projects.
Comments