Business Data Analysis with Excel and Power BI: Start for Free

Start analysing sales and stock data with Excel, Google Sheets and the free Power BI Desktop, with a shop example, a 4-week plan and recommended courses.

Sales, stock, expenses: businesses of every size already have this data, but most of it gets typed into Excel and left there. Yet the same data can answer important questions, such as which products to reorder, which branch is starting to slip, or whether last month's promotion paid off. This article shows how to start analysing business data with free tools, from Excel or Google Sheets to Power BI.

What data analytics means for a business

It means turning recorded numbers into answers you can act on. You do not need complex models. Just ask a clear question, keep the data clean, and summarise it so readers understand it on one page.

Step 1: Get your data ready

Most problems are not about formulas but about messy data. Before analysing, check that:

• Each row is one record, such as one bill or one line item
• There is a single header row with no merged cells
• Dates use the same format throughout the column
• Product and branch names are written the same way every time, not "Branch 1" in one row and "Branch One" in another

Step 2: Excel or Google Sheets, a starting point you can use today

No coding needed. A few basic formulas and tools can answer many business questions.

• SUMIFS / COUNTIFS: total by condition, such as how many units of product A sold this month
• Pivot Table: summarise sales by month, product or staff member in a few clicks
• XLOOKUP or INDEX-MATCH: pull data from another table, such as unit cost into your sales table
• Charts: line charts for trends, bar charts to compare products or branches

Example: a coffee shop with 3 branches

The owner has a daily sales file from the POS. Using a Pivot Table to summarise by branch and time of day, they see one branch is busy in the morning but quiet in the afternoon, so they try an afternoon promotion at that branch only instead of discounting everywhere. That decision came from one table, with no expensive tools.

Step 3: Power BI for dashboards

According to the Microsoft Power BI Desktop page, you can download it and build interactive reports for free. Connect it to your Excel file and build a dashboard you can filter, not a static chart.

• Put sales, costs and monthly trends on one page
• Select a branch or period and every chart on the page updates
• Refresh with new data without rebuilding the charts each time

If you want to share reports online with your team, there may be licensing conditions, so check with Microsoft before using it for real.

Dashboards a small business should have

1. Sales dashboard: daily and monthly sales, best sellers and the channels that bring revenue
2. Inventory dashboard: stock on hand, items running low and slow movers
3. P&L dashboard: revenue, expenses, gross profit and trends

You do not need to be a data scientist to analyse business data. Start with a clear question and a clean table.

Common mistakes

• Making lots of charts with no business question behind them
• Editing numbers by hand in the summary file so they no longer match the source data
• Keeping customers' personal data in widely shared files

A 4-week learning path

1. Week 1: Excel basics: formulas, tables and charts
2. Week 2: Pivot Tables and SUMIFS to summarise data
3. Week 3: Power BI basics: connect Excel and build your first dashboard
4. Week 4: Build a real dashboard from your business data and have your manager or partner try it

Recommended courses on Plants.work

• Excel basics for beginners
• Summarising data in Google Sheets with Pivot Tables and SUMIFS
• Business data analysis with the QUERY formula, with a case study
• Introduction to data analysis with Power BI for beginners
• Power BI basics from an Excel file

Want your analysis to move people to act? Read Data Storytelling. And if you want to turn this into a career, browse data jobs on Plants.work.