Adventure Works data set is very well-known MSSQL dataset and has been used on many dashboards. It’s a massive dataset and definitely needs some normalization before data modelling. You can find this dataset either in database form (for SQL) or CVS and you can check Microsoft’s website for it.

There is not much to talk about Adventure Works data set to be honest. It is considered one of the starter data set for SQL and dashboard analysis. Still it is interesting to see while company focuses on producing bikes, most profitable category is accessories. It reminds the pattern in many companies, lowering the price on main product (we don’t know whether it is the case though, it’s just a metaphor) and make money on side products.

PowerBI may be very potent BI tool, but its engine is getting slow and glitching easily if you have bunch of measures and visuals on dashboard. For that finding the sweet spot between measures and new columns. As a rule o thumb, you should consider measures as first choice and don’t use columns unless there is a huge need. Though PowerBI Server has pagination don’t feel shy to use some in dashboard links to paginate your dashboards. In this dashboard I had to extend my actual screen but due to limitation I used direction arrows on top of the screen to go next page or go back. You can easily do that by turning on the Actions in item options. Last but not least, forecast is extremely powerful tool, yet you have to know what you are doing on it. In this data, you can easily see that there is a sharp decrease on profit at the end of the graph. That’s why I skipped the last month and started the forecast from previous month. That doesn’t mean that I did something right, but just be careful and if needs be, don’t be shy to adapt your forecast.