SQL (Structured Query Language) is one of the most important skills for us, data people. So in this article + video, get the necessary SQL skills you need for Data Analysis work.
Step 0: Install MySQL software
I am using the FREE MySQL Community Edition software to learn & practice SQL at home. You can get it from here.
If you have any other database software available (such as SQL Server or Oracle), you can use them to follow this tutorial.
Step 1: Import Awesome Chocolates Dataset
You need some data to practice SQL. So I prepared a sample dataset for a fictional (but yummy) company called Awesome Chocolates.
Download the .SQL file from here.
After you have the file,
- Open MySQL Workbench, login if necessary
- Click on the “server administration” tab (see illustration, click to expand)
- Click on “Data Import/Restore”
- Select the option “Import from self-contained file”
- Specify the path of the downloaded awesome-chocolates-data.sql file
- Start import
At the end of these steps, your MySQL should have the awesome chocolates database. Congratulations 🎉🥳
You can see this from “Schemas” tab on the workbench
Using SQL Server?
You can also use SQL Server to practice SQL. If you are using SQL Server Management Console, then follow below steps to import the data.
- Download this SQL Server Backup file
- Unzip the file
- Open SSMS & right click on the databases and chose “Restore Database” option. Follow the steps on that screen using below screenshots.
Step 2: Learn SQL for Data Analysis with this video
Everything is ready. Time to learn SQL.
I made an hour long tutorial to explain all the necessary SQL concepts for you. In this video, you will learn:
- How to use SELECT statement to answer business questions
- Working with WHERE clause
- Using AND, OR, NOT and combining them to create complex queries.
- Sorting query results using ORDER BY
- Combining data from two or more tables using JOINS
- Creating reports with GROUP BY
- More than 50 example queries, tips and ideas
Please watch the video below or on my YouTube Channel.
The Queries
Here are some of the example queries covered in the video lesson. Feel free to copy paste them in to SQL console to see how they work.
-- Select everything from sales table
select * from sales;
-- Show just a few columns from sales table
select SaleDate, Amount, Customers from sales;
select Amount, Customers, GeoID from sales;
-- Adding a calculated column with SQL
Select SaleDate, Amount, Boxes, Amount / boxes from sales;
-- Naming a field with AS in SQL
Select SaleDate, Amount, Boxes, Amount / boxes as 'Amount per box' from sales;
-- Using WHERE Clause in SQL
select * from sales
where amount > 10000;
-- Showing sales data where amount is greater than 10,000 by descending order
select * from sales
where amount > 10000
order by amount desc;
-- Showing sales data where geography is g1 by product ID &
-- descending order of amounts
select * from sales
where geoid='g1'
order by PID, Amount desc;
-- Working with dates in SQL
Select * from sales
where amount > 10000 and SaleDate >= '2022-01-01';
-- Using year() function to select all data in a specific year
select SaleDate, Amount from sales
where amount > 10000 and year(SaleDate) = 2022
order by amount desc;
-- BETWEEN condition in SQL with < & > operators
select * from sales
where boxes >0 and boxes <=50;
-- Using the between operator in SQL
select * from sales
where boxes between 0 and 50;
-- Using weekday() function in SQL
select SaleDate, Amount, Boxes, weekday(SaleDate) as 'Day of week'
from sales
where weekday(SaleDate) = 4;
-- Working with People table
select * from people;
-- OR operator in SQL
select * from people
where team = 'Delish' or team = 'Jucies';
-- IN operator in SQL
select * from people
where team in ('Delish','Jucies');
-- LIKE operator in SQL
select * from people
where salesperson like 'B%';
select * from people
where salesperson like '%B%';
select * from sales;
-- Using CASE to create branching logic in SQL
select SaleDate, Amount,
case when amount < 1000 then 'Under 1k'
when amount < 5000 then 'Under 5k'
when amount < 10000 then 'Under 10k'
else '10k or more'
end as 'Amount category'
from sales;
-- GROUP BY in SQL
select team, count(*) from people
group by team
SQL Practice Problems
Once you understand the concepts I’ve demoed in the video, try to solve below homework problems.
If you want to cheat, use the solutions tab to see the answers.
INTERMEDIATE PROBLEMS
👉 You need to combine various concepts covered in the video to solve these
1. Print details of shipments (sales) where amounts are > 2,000 and boxes are <100?
2. How many shipments (sales) each of the sales persons had in the month of January 2022?
3. Which product sells more boxes? Milk Bars or Eclairs?
4. Which product sold more boxes in the first 7 days of February 2022? Milk Bars or Eclairs?
5. Which shipments had under 100 customers & under 100 boxes? Did any of them occur on Wednesday?
HARD PROBLEMS
👉 These require concepts not covered in the video
1. What are the names of salespersons who had at least one shipment (sale) in the first 7 days of January 2022?
2. Which salespersons did not make any shipments in the first 7 days of January 2022?
3. How many times we shipped more than 1,000 boxes in each month?
4. Did we ship at least one box of ‘After Nines’ to ‘New Zealand’ on all the months?
5. India or Australia? Who buys more chocolate boxes on a monthly basis?
INTERMEDIATE PROBLEMS:
— 1. Print details of shipments (sales) where amounts are > 2,000 and boxes are <100?
select * from sales where amount > 2000 and boxes < 100;
— 2. How many shipments (sales) each of the sales persons had in the month of January 2022?
select p.Salesperson, count(*) as ‘Shipment Count’
from sales s
join people p on s.spid = p.spid
where SaleDate between ‘2022-1-1’ and ‘2022-1-31’
group by p.Salesperson;
— 3. Which product sells more boxes? Milk Bars or Eclairs?
select pr.product, sum(boxes) as ‘Total Boxes’
from sales s
join products pr on s.pid = pr.pid
where pr.Product in (‘Milk Bars’, ‘Eclairs’)
group by pr.product;
— 4. Which product sold more boxes in the first 7 days of February 2022? Milk Bars or Eclairs?
select pr.product, sum(boxes) as ‘Total Boxes’
from sales s
join products pr on s.pid = pr.pid
where pr.Product in (‘Milk Bars’, ‘Eclairs’)
and s.saledate between ‘2022-2-1’ and ‘2022-2-7’
group by pr.product;
— 5. Which shipments had under 100 customers & under 100 boxes? Did any of them occur on Wednesday?
select * from sales
where customers < 100 and boxes < 100;
select *,
case when weekday(saledate)=2 then ‘Wednesday Shipment’
else ”
end as ‘W Shipment’
from sales
where customers < 100 and boxes < 100;
HARD PROBLEMS:
— What are the names of salespersons who had at least one shipment (sale) in the first 7 days of January 2022?
select distinct p.Salesperson
from sales s
join people p on p.spid = s.SPID
where s.SaleDate between ‘2022-01-01’ and ‘2022-01-07’;
— Which salespersons did not make any shipments in the first 7 days of January 2022?
select p.salesperson
from people p
where p.spid not in
(select distinct s.spid from sales s where s.SaleDate between ‘2022-01-01’ and ‘2022-01-07’);
— How many times we shipped more than 1,000 boxes in each month?
select year(saledate) ‘Year’, month(saledate) ‘Month’, count(*) ‘Times we shipped 1k boxes’
from sales
where boxes>1000
group by year(saledate), month(saledate)
order by year(saledate), month(saledate);
— Did we ship at least one box of ‘After Nines’ to ‘New Zealand’ on all the months?
set @product_name = ‘After Nines’;
set @country_name = ‘New Zealand’;
select year(saledate) ‘Year’, month(saledate) ‘Month’,
if(sum(boxes)>1, ‘Yes’,’No’) ‘Status’
from sales s
join products pr on pr.PID = s.PID
join geo g on g.GeoID=s.GeoID
where pr.Product = @product_name and g.Geo = @country_name
group by year(saledate), month(saledate)
order by year(saledate), month(saledate);
— India or Australia? Who buys more chocolate boxes on a monthly basis?
select year(saledate) ‘Year’, month(saledate) ‘Month’,
sum(CASE WHEN g.geo=’India’ = 1 THEN boxes ELSE 0 END) ‘India Boxes’,
sum(CASE WHEN g.geo=’Australia’ = 1 THEN boxes ELSE 0 END) ‘Australia Boxes’
from sales s
join geo g on g.GeoID=s.GeoID
group by year(saledate), month(saledate)
order by year(saledate), month(saledate);
Resources to Learn More
SQL is a great skill to have if you work with data. Please use below courses, books, articles & websites to learn more.
SQL BOOKs 📚
I recommend getting these SQL books.
SQL COURSEs 💻
I recommend trying out these courses on SkillShare academy.
SQL WEBSITEs 🌐
Do check out these helpful websites to learn and understand various SQL concepts.
If you use my links to purchase the books or courses, I get a small affiliate commission.
There is no extra cost to you, obviously.
SQL Alternatives
If you want an alternative to SQL, consider learning Power Query.
Here is an article and here is a video to help you with that.
All the best 👍
I wish you all the best with your SQL learning. Do let me know in the comments below if you have enjoyed this article and the video.
49 Responses to “Interactive Pivot Table Calendar & Chart in Excel!”
Excellent post again from awesome chandoo.org
This is one of the post to evident, without using macros we can create excellent charts using available excel options.
Slicer is one of the useful option in excel 2010 .. excited to see more options in excel 2013.
Regards,
Saran
http://www.lostinexcel.blogspot.com
Nice one chandoo............... great work done.....
Cool article. Only downside was that I didn't see at first that I needed 2010. Guess I still have to wait awhile before getting to try this out myself.
I consider myself an Excel expert, but you constantly amaze me with posts like this. Fantastic calendar!
Good post, like this little trick!!
How to not show the value in the cell
format the cell to custom with the below
;;;
Could you add lists of holidays to be transferred to the calendar days?
Two lists would be needed: 1) for the holidays that stay fixed (eg, CHristmas), and 2) for the holidays that move around (eg, Thanksgiving).
Such lists would be prepared externally, and the program would transfer their information to the appropriate days.
Wow! This is something amazing. I am going to do some practicals with this and show a sales trend on this. As we have our sales plans weekly basis, this should impress by boss when put in dashboard. Cool.
And thanks1
Chandoo you have a knack of getting on to these great looking very creative ideas!
One thing with calendars I have seen before is not catering for able to enter notes or appointments or project milestones. But with this one it's easy enough to add the extra lines as you have done for the chart concept and link to this other type of info.
For 2003 we could replace slicers with a validation style dropdown couldn't we?
Chandoo, you are awesome;) i was using calender to show my reports, but i had made all months and then underneith date shows the value, man its really awesome . i am going to use this format for my reports.. only draw back for me is i am using 2007. hence no slicer.. may be have to modify with out slicer.
Why not use =weeknum() for the weeknum column?
Great tricks! I love trying to reproduce the charts myself to get the hang of 'em. This one was great.
My only issue is getting the VBA in the year object to refresh the data. I used the VBA provided at the link, and, I can see it in the Macros tab, but, when I click the spinner the data does not update. Any tips?
Thx!
3G
^^Ignore this! NOT ENOUGH COFFEE YET.
I forgot about the "Assign Macro" option
:-s
Just started at chandoo - this is great!
I opted to use the formula =IF(F6>F5,G5,G5+1) for my weeknum - worked for me (I didn't get all the way through the example, since I'm running Excel 2007 - so don't know if that'll affect anything later in the example). I'm open to comments on this alternative approach.
Thanks for creating this website!
VC (Excel student).
Very cool - but now I'm even more excited for the new time controls for Excel 2013!
Great calendar...
I wonder whether we can make a school calendar (Class, subjects, teachers) using this calendar, assuming the weekly plan is duplicated across the year.
I would love to be a part of creating a class schedule...I'm attempting to help a friend (gratis) to do just that - can you point me in the right direction or provide a sample of sorts?
[...] Wow – what do you think of the interactive calendar chart demo above? To achieve this impressive effect you must have Excel 2010 because it utilises slicers, which is a feature introduced in Excel 2010. Find out how this treasure was created on Chandoo’s page. [...]
Hello Chandoo,
Great works! I learn a lot from this website. Here is the problem I met when I follow your tutorial: once I run and save this cool pivot calendar chart , the size of excel file will increase every time. Could you let me know how to figure it out? Thank you for your time in advance.
An excel chart-fan from China.
I already figured it out.
wow, love the calendar, i'm a newbie, found this site and it's amazing.
Got it mostly figured out, but could do with help with your named range 'tblchosen'
I can build the pivots, link the calendars together but can't see how to use index(tblchosen...) to pull through the productivity figures
appreciate any help
thanks
Great. Miss the Today button. Will try and figure a way to add this to the file.
I want to start the week on Monday, not Sunday (MTWTFSS). Re-arranging the calendar tab works however, any month where the 1st is a Sunday starts on the second and totally omits Sun 1. I have been tinkerign for a while, but can't seem to figure this out.
Changing F2 on the 'Calcs' tab to 2 so that the week starts on Monday works.
Cutting & pasting Sunday on the 'Pivot Calendar' tab and moving all cells up 1 row works.
However, using April 2013 for example, you lose the 1st off of the pivot calendar so that the month starts on 2 April. What should happen is the first row should only show Sun 1 April and then the next row starts Mon 2 April. Still can't fugure out where the problem lies.
"Further Enhancements:
Adjust week start to Monday: Likewise, you can modify your formulas to adjust weekstart to Monday or any other day you fancy."
I have tinkered with this previously with no success, does anyone know which formulas require tinkering, I have only succeeded in breaking this in an effort start a week on a Monday.
[...] Interactivo Artículo original var dd_offset_from_content = 50; var dd_top_offset_from_content = 0; Tags: 2013, calendario, [...]
Completely off topic, but how do you create those animated pictures in your tutorials? It is not a movie (like the Youtube movie), so what software do you use to create such high quality "animated" pictires? Thanks
Jeroen
the animated pics are called Animated Gifs
they are made using Camtasia
Refer: http://chandoo.org/wp/about/what-we-use/
This is fairly easy to do just using calendar formulas, which would be quicker, and doesn't need VBA? Am I missing something?
[...] on how to generate an interactive calendar using pivot tables. Please check out Chandoo’s Interactive Pivot Table Calendar & Chart in Excel before reading this, as I want to go through how I used his method to adapt a calendar which was [...]
Great tip shared by you... howevr would appreciate if you could mention in your tricks about excel version. The example above would work only in excel 2010 and above I believe. Please help me if there is any way we can use the tip in excel 2007 as well..
Many Thanks,
Regards,
FK
Hi, I'm going to give this a shot, but one small question before I do. Can a linked cell be updated based on the date that is selected from the calendar? The calendar is really cool and this would make is especially good to use (and easy and fast).
Regards,
swissfish.
This post is awesome, and using your instructions, I was able to get this to work with a pivot table that pulls directly from a Project Server database. It was a bit complicated to get the day to sum correctly, but I managed to finagle it. I hope you don't mind if I link back to you when I post my instructions.
Thanks for giving me a starting point for this!
[...] http://chandoo.org/wp/2012/09/12/interactive-pivot-calendar/ [...]
This is great, and pretty much everything I was looking for.
However, I already have a large spreadsheet, and I want to include your worksheets in it. I copied all the worksheets and the Module 1, but I can't get it to work. What else do I need to transfer / update please?
Hello there, is it possible to use this pivot to produce a calendar style chart, with returns multiple data per date, which on the calendar then, when clicked links to the data to provide more background information? What do you think? I'd love if I could pivot when i need. thanks, m
Hi, did you ever figure out how to do this? I would love to find a way...
This is amazing and will work well for my calendar project! My question is, how can I expand the calendar to fit a standard sheet of paper?
Wow - this is so creative. I'm taking the basic idea and building a reservation calendar.
Question: How do you get the month and year slicers on a different page than the pivot tables? I'd like to have my final calendar on a separate page from the pivot.
[…] http://chandoo.org/wp/2012/09/12/interactive-pivot-calendar/ […]
This is perfect...is there a way to add notes/tasks to the individual days?
Excel will not let me insert blank rows between lines in the pivot table. I am use Excel 2013 - is there a pivot table tools command that must be used?
I can create the pivot table calender with a year spinner & month slicer but I do not see how to display the the attendance information that I have in the original data table.
Thank you for the wonderful post and I am sorry for my lack of understanding...
Excellent!
Please show me how to add an alternative calendar to this calendar, Chinese or lunar calendar (and by lunar I don't mean phases of the moon), like what they still use in Asia
Thanks
Christopher
[…] Wow – what do you think of the interactive calendar chart demo above? To achieve this impressive effect you must have Excel 2010 because it utilises slicers, which is a feature introduced in Excel 2010. Find out how this treasure was created on Chandoo’s page. […]
Hello my name is Maurice, excuse me for my further request, but believe me, without your help priprio not know how to solve this problem.
So: always using a chart positioned on an excel sheet I wanted to match each square (series) to a single cell, to create a perpetual calendar.
Now everything works fine; except that for a fact, and it is this: In the calendar as you well know some numbers may not be apparent until certain conditions, which I solved by writing this "= O code (AA5 = DATE ( $ H $ 1; MONTH ($ AD $ 12) +1; 1)) and the game and done.
Now I would like to achieve the same thing using the Chart; How can I do to make this happen! let me also just a practical example so that I can understand all the rest then I'll do; Thanks Greetings from A.Maurizio
Link Program : Link: https://app.box.com/s/lhqva3eji0xcf2nmk8lxyki88tt1mi5t
Great info, thanks for sharing
Hi,
I love your calendar however I am modifying it for use in displaying employee performance metrics on a day by day basis.
I see where tblChosen and tblDates are named ranges however I cannot find them anywhere.
Are they assigned to specific cells because I cannot tell.
I see both of them in the Name Manager, which tells me what they refer to but does not give a value or cell location.
@Mike
With the Names in the Name Manager
Simply select the name
Then click in the Refers To: box at the Bottom
Excel will take you to where the Named Range is referring to
[…] Wow – what do you think of the interactive calendar chart demo above? To achieve this impressive effect you must have Excel 2010 because it utilises slicers, which is a feature introduced in Excel 2010. Find out how this treasure was created on Chandoo’s page. […]
Hi, Chandoo
This Pivot Calendar is an excellent idea. I’ve done one for myself using your guidelines. I just need something I’m not being able to do. I need that when I open the file the default date is set to today’s date. I know how to do it with conditional formatting. But I think I’ll need some vba coding for this. Can you please help me with this. Thanks in advance