💡 Mastering Excel & Power BI: From Tariff Challenges to Data Merging Magic! 📊✨

Struggling with product pricing or data analysis? This session turned complex challenges into simple, practical steps—perfect for entrepreneurs, analysts, and anyone working with Excel or Power BI!

🔍 Quick Recap: What You’ll Learn

  • How to automate price increases using Excel & Power BI 💹

  • Smart use of VLOOKUP, HLOOKUP, and XLOOKUP in Excel 🔄

  • Powerful techniques for merging and transforming data 🔗

  • Handling null values and filtering like a pro 🚿

  • Practical use cases with Expo data, bank statements, and more 📁

📈 The Tariff Pricing Problem—Solved with Excel

A common scenario in many businesses:
💬 “How do I increase product prices by 125% for tariffed items only?”

The solution? Two Excel sheets:

  • One with product prices

  • One showing which items are tariffed

Using lookup functions (VLOOKUP, HLOOKUP, XLOOKUP), it became crystal clear how to cross-reference the data and apply the right pricing changes. This approach can also be used for salary adjustments, inventory changes, and other real-world scenarios. ✅

⚙️ Automating with Power BI: Let the Data Work for You

Why do it manually when Power BI can do the heavy lifting?

Participants learned how to:

  • Open Power BI and launch Power Query

  • Connect multiple Excel files and set the first row as headers

  • Filter out nulls (non-tariffed items)

  • Merge datasets from Excel, CSV—even PDF files!

  • Expand columns and create clean, ready-to-analyze data

💡 Use case: Automatically apply 125% pricing to only tariffed items by merging pricing data and tariff tags in Power BI.

🔄 Merging, Filtering, and Joining—Made Simple

One of the biggest wins from the session was clarity on merging queries:

✅ Common Join Types:

  • Inner Join: Finds common entries between two files (e.g., people who attended both 2024 and 2025 Qatar Expo)

  • Full Outer Join: Combines all records—even unmatched ones—great for inclusive reports

Participants practiced merging Excel files from Qatar Expo events, learned to expand columns, and uncovered insightful attendee overlaps.

🔧 Aggregate & Customize Your Data

Beyond merging, the session dove into:

  • Summing total hours worked by employees

  • Creating custom columns (e.g., calculating adjusted salaries for top performers)

Power BI turned raw data into dynamic, real-world business intelligence.

🎯 Takeaways & Next Steps

By mastering Excel’s lookup functions and Power BI’s merging, filtering, and automation features, you can:
✅ Save time
✅ Reduce manual errors
✅ Make smarter decisions faster

 
🎓 Want to dive deeper?
✅  Join a Free Demo Class
Enroll in Our Power BI Course
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🚀 Final Thoughts

From tackling pricing problems to merging complex datasets, this session showed how digital tools can elevate your decision-making and productivity. Whether you’re just getting started or want to level up your data skills—there’s a powerful solution at your fingertips.

Stay curious, keep building, and let your data tell the story! 📊💡