Method in Motion

A Tableau dashboard I built from CRM pipeline data and structured around four questions sales and operations leaders actually ask: is a region underperforming, is one slower to close, is the business growing, and where is the client base concentrated. The breakdown covers the checks — product mix, account difficulty, deal volume — approach method I run before calling any region behind.

$172M in total sales looked healthy, until the number was broken out by customer category instead of left as one flat total. I modeled invoice line items against a customer list in Power BI to see which channels were actually driving that revenue. The model surfaced what the top-line total hid: one channel, Novelty Shop, was carrying about 70% of the $172M, while the other four sat close together and far behind it. The video walks through every build step, from importing and relating the data to publishing the finished report.

Take a column list with a bunch of repeats in it, keep only one of each thing, and put them in order. Two functions — UNIQUE and SORT — turning a 200,000-row column of sales records into a clean, always-sorted list of stores, the kind of dependable foundation a dashboard filter is built on. The video walks through why UNIQUE alone leaves the order to chance and how wrapping it in SORT makes the result predictable.

Importing data you need from another source or master file. A formula that connects live to a spreadsheet another team owns and updates independently, then filters it down to one neighborhood's worth of inventory data automatically. The video walkthrough covers why a manual copy goes stale the moment the source changes, and why IMPORTRANGE & QUERY Live Pulls is the best formula to use.

Filtering a table down to just the rows that matter when the one piece of info that makes it useful — a supplier, a product name — sits in a completely different tab. Three functions on a 200,000-row sales dataset: XLOOKUP fetches the connected values from another tab, HSTACK lines the pulled-in columns up side by side, and FILTER narrows the result to every transaction where the product cost more than $5. The video covers why this pattern shows up constantly in sales operations, and why combining all three into one self-updating formula beats filtering one table and cross-referencing the other by hand.

Pulling an order's status by its Order ID, and the two formulas that can get you there. VLOOKUP counts columns from the search column and only looks right, while XLOOKUP just names the return column directly and can look either direction — a difference that matters the moment a column gets inserted or moved. The video walks through both formulas side by side, when each one is the right call, and why locking a finished result in as a value protects it from a later edit upstream.