Tools: Excel (Power Query, SUMIFS, INDEX/MATCH, PivotTables) | Power BI (DAX, interactive dashboard) | World Bank Open Data
Which international market is the strongest growth opportunity for Global Superstore, and which one is quietly losing money — and why?
An end-to-end analytics project spanning data cleaning, external data enrichment, statistical analysis, and an interactive dashboard — built first in Excel, then rebuilt in Power BI.
The Excel version demonstrates Power Query cleaning, multi-table merges, and formula-driven analysis. The Power BI version delivers a fully interactive report with DAX measures and cross-filtering across all visuals.
Global Superstore — 1,000 orders across 2012 to 2015, covering 5 markets (USCA, Europe, Asia Pacific, Africa, LATAM), 22 regions, and 93 countries.
Enriched with real GDP growth data (annual %) from the World Bank Open Data API, merged on Country and Order Year — matching each transaction to the economic conditions of its country in that specific year.
Africa outperforms every market on margin despite being the smallest. Africa posts the highest profit margin in the portfolio at 23.9%, while generating under 7% of total sales. Asia Pacific is the mirror image — it accounts for 47% of global sales but sits near the bottom on margin at 15.6%. Global Superstore appears to be scaling volume in Asia Pacific faster than it is scaling profitability.
USCA has a structural product-mix problem. Average order value in USCA is $277, roughly 6 to 8 times lower than every other market. The cause traces back to category mix: 53% of USCA sales are Office Supplies, compared to 20 to 35% everywhere else. Since 194 of USCA's 200 orders are from the United States, this is a real, persistent pattern rather than noise.
GDP growth does not predict individual order value. I tested whether a country's GDP growth rate predicts how much a customer spends per order. The correlation came out at r = 0.12, explaining roughly 1% of variance. Purchase decisions are driven by customer need, not macroeconomic conditions, at the transaction level. GDP growth does loosely align with market-level margin patterns, suggesting economic conditions matter more strategically than transactionally.
Africa has an unusually high critical-priority order rate. 42.6% of Africa's orders are marked critical priority — more than three times USCA's rate of 12%. Africa still posts the best margin despite this, which raises an open question worth investigating further: is the strong margin coming despite real operational strain, or is a higher rate of urgent orders simply how that market operates?
Phase 1 — Data cleaning (Power Query) Fixed data types, trimmed text fields, added calculated columns for Order Year, Days to Ship, and Profit Margin. Merged World Bank GDP growth data on Country and Order Year using a left outer join. Resolved 11 country-name mismatches between the two sources (e.g. "Russia" vs. "Russian Federation") and documented 2 genuine coverage gaps (Taiwan and Martinique).
Phase 2 — Analysis (Excel) Built a market summary table using SUMIFS and AVERAGEIFS across 10 metrics including total sales, profit margin, average order value, shipping cost as a percentage of sales, and average GDP growth. Built a category-mix PivotTable showing sales composition by market. Ran a CORREL test on GDP growth against individual order value to test the economic hypothesis directly.
Phase 3 — Dashboard (Power BI) Created 5 DAX measures: Total Sales, Total Profit, Profit Margin %, Avg Order Value, and Avg GDP Growth. Built 3 visuals: clustered column for Sales and Profit by Market, clustered column for Profit Margin by Market, and a 100% stacked bar for Category Mix by Market. Added a Market slicer with cross-filtering across all visuals and KPI cards.
| File | Description |
|---|---|
Global_Superstore_Project.xlsx |
Full Excel workbook: Project Brief, Raw Data, Clean Data, Analysis, Category Mix, and Dashboard tabs |
Global_Superstore_PowerBI.pbix |
Power BI report with DAX measures, 3 charts, KPI cards, and Market slicer |
Excel: Open Global_Superstore_Project.xlsx in Excel 2016 or later. If prompted to enable content or refresh data connections, click Enable.
Power BI: Download Power BI Desktop free from Microsoft, then open Global_Superstore_PowerBI.pbix. No account required to view locally.
Built as part of a portfolio targeting Data and Business Analytics co-op roles. Dataset: Global Superstore (industry-standard practice dataset). External enrichment: World Bank Open Data (GDP growth, annual %).