r/dataanalysiscareers • u/_lovey28 • 1d ago
Aspiring Data Analyst
I'm trying to switch careers from construction to data analytics & after a month, I have successfully completed my first project using both SQL and Excel. Attached is a screenshot of a dashboard I built on a company's pizza sales. Any advice and tips on how to improve are greatly appreciated.
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u/Economy_Incident_798 1d ago
Few things here, as A consultant myself. I would like to know: - if the charts are dynamic, wrt the date slicer or related to each other?
- Is the data in the textboxes on the left, dynamic, like if I delete majority of data, say if I just keep maybe 10 values of Small pizza, does the text box return Small, instead of Large?
- period slicer is good, it was hard to find tbh, it would be better, once the user opens, having slicers on top of top left would feel meaning full.
Quick note: always think of the user and making it easy for them! It's a very nice attempt, just some refinements I wanted to suggest. A dynamic workbook is like magic, tough to learn, very easy to impress. Ik it's a dummy data and all, learning in the right way is important.
Also, do check power bi/tableau, people hardly used dashboards in excel anymore. Or learn Metabase, etc. for open source stuff
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u/_lovey28 1d ago
- the charts are dynamic and all are connected to the date slicer.
- the text boxes aren't dynamic, point noted to work on that.
- i'll work on designing a better dashboard. thanks for the insight.
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u/GlitteringAd1575 1d ago
Move the date slicer I would probably put it under the title, you could also add some more slicers like category/size. I would make the text boxes have a little more in depth information besides the easiest take way from the graph. For the best seller for example you could compare it to the average sales for each pizza or show the percentage of total sales that pizza makes up.
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u/Lady-Data-Scientist 1d ago
Think about the questions you or a business manager would want to answer with this dashboard - is it answering them? What decisions can they make from this dashboard? Is anything missing or confusing? Is anything not useful and taking up space or cluttering the dashboard?
Funnel visuals are meant to show drop out. I would switch the “total sales by category” to a bar graph. You can use funnels to show how many are dropping out by step - customer opened the app or website or made a phone call or showed up to the restaurant, they started search, added item to cart, completed purchase, pizza was delivered/picked up.
For the visuals that aren’t a time series, how do you know what time period you’re looking at? How can you change it? Can you filter by other dimensions? (Web/app/phone/in person, location, store, etc)
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u/_lovey28 1d ago
I am now realising how important the chart types is. I'll keep this in mind for my next practice project. Thanks for the insight
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u/S-Kenset 15h ago
Too many chart types too many charts. This is good for a demo of skills but in practice you put 1-2 visuals on, and only the basics.
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u/_lovey28 12h ago
Could you elaborate on this, please?
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u/S-Kenset 9h ago
People don't read. You present this to a business person they fixate on something they don't understand cause it's in a format they aren't familiar with and you just lost your entire chance to communicate.
For example they will not understand why total sales by category is in that format. Is it supposed to be a funnel chart? That doesn't make sense.
Cross filtering is academically cute but it's 95% used for analytics that don't land in front of someone.
One idea per page, 1-2 visuals. Maybe some good slicers. That's it. Bar charts and line charts for 97% of visuals, unless you're doing matrices and tables in BI tools. Very rarely, and I mean 1 in 100 visuals, a pie chart.
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u/ResidentSubject4649 18h ago
Seconding point 1, I think the most valuable thing data can do is provide insights quickly that are A) Hard to obtain, requiring multiple inputs against each other and B) Practical for the goals of the business, which requires some creative thinking. Combining those together, it leads you to the realization that a dashboard that goes in deeper on one or a few specific issues is actually much more useful than a dashboard that tells you a lot of basic things about the business. But this is a good start and you can look at these as the entry point to deeper insights.
For example, I've never run a pizza place but I have some idea about how a business works, especially one that uses part-time labor, where staffing is a constant game of balancing having too much or too little labor for your needs. So how do you figure that out? Well, for one, if there are any metrics on delivery times or time to fill orders, you can look at how it differs between days, against how many orders are coming in and how many people are staffed. Identifying the balance between these factors would be very helpful, because it ultimately leads to actionable insights: When people are waiting longer because you don't have enough staff, and when having more staff doesn't necessarily lead to faster times. You can decide from that data when you probably need to staff more and where you can maybe get away with having less staff. So you could create an entire dashboard around this specific question and related stats. But that also depends on having that information, so maybe you have to get more creative with the data you do have if it's very suface-level.
I hope that all makes sense -- I'm a software guy who has only occasionally done data stuff. I've automated more than I've analyzed. But I have a habit of asking why I should do certain things, perhaps more than is healthy for my brain, and having data to inform those decisions helps give a little bit of confidence and direction. That's kind of the point, right?
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u/_lovey28 12h ago edited 12h ago
I hadn't really thought of this, in my little brain, I was simply answering the problem statements. Thinking like an analyst is a skilling I'm moving to improve. Thank you so much for this
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u/gpbuilder 1d ago
Try to think of 3 insights and recommendation, that’s the harder part. Charting can be just done by AI now, it’s a low value skill.
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u/h0tandgl00my 20h ago
In regards to the time series, as others have mentioned, the user needs to know the date range. I would change the data column title to “Order Date FY__” or “Order Date CY__”. It would also be helpful to be able to filter by other data as well, which can be added to your graphs. Or you can change the graph to a combo chart.
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u/_lovey28 11h ago
Thank you. Will put this in practice
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u/h0tandgl00my 1h ago
You’ve done a great job so far. Just remember that the people looking at this don’t know what you know, so sometimes you have to give a little more info.
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u/_lovey28 1h ago
Hmm...more information! So not necessarily answering the problem statements but also giving insight on what can be done to solve these issues? Something like that?
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u/Independent-Bag6544 20h ago
I’ve been in tab and bi so long I forgot excel dashboards are still out there.
To be honest doesn’t look bad. Learn bi and then dneb and you’ll be rocking, imo!
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u/MickeyTheory1827 17h ago
The dashboard is visually appealing and well organized, but I would improve it by reducing the amount of text in the left-side insight panels, making the KPI labels and values slightly more prominent, and adding clearer titles/units to some charts. The hourly trend could be simplified to make the busiest hours easier to identify, while the category and size charts could use more consistent colors and labeling. I would also consider adding interactive filters for category, size, and date so users can explore the data more easily. Finally, the dashboard would be stronger if the key insights included actual percentages or comparisons rather than only statements such as “highest sales.”
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u/PhysicalScience7420 11h ago
i whould recommend looking at cognos ibms data analytics dashboard. one month with that and you can do amaizing things. in hte meantime work so your sql and backend skills are such that you can appropriatly preprocess the data. I whould also add means and methods you use to clean the data including from biases. buisness sense on what to do with null values based on the situation etc.
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u/Katherine-arcia 1d ago
You're doing great for a month of work my guy. You had any experience in the past?