“You can click on that bar,” Clara said.
She stared at the thirteen Excel tabs blinking on her screen. Sales data from Singapore. Logistics from Leipzig. Customer sentiment from a survey sent to 40,000 people, which had come back as 40,000 individual CSV files. Her boss, Marcus, wanted a unified dashboard by Friday. “Make it sing, Clara,” he had said.
For the first time, she saw the story : Singapore’s sales were high in Q2 but crashed in Q3 due to a shipping delay. Leipzig’s logistics were fine, but customer sentiment was lowest there. The connections appeared like constellations. “You can click on that bar,” Clara said
The first slide wasn’t a slide. It was the —a clean, dark-mode canvas with three large buttons. Marcus leaned forward.
Friday morning, Marcus walked over with a coffee. “Ready to cry together?” Logistics from Leipzig
Dan’s first lesson was revolutionary: Stop cleaning data before you import it. Clara had spent years deleting blank rows and fixing date formats manually. Dan taught her to use .
“Make it interactive,” Dan said. “Let them click. Let them discover.” “Make it sing, Clara,” he had said
That evening, scrolling through LinkedIn in a fit of procrastination, she saw an ad for a course: Microsoft Power BI - A Complete Introduction 2020 Edition . The thumbnail showed a sleek, teal-colored bar chart that looked like it belonged on a spaceship. Price: $49.99. She bought it before finishing her coffee.