Let's Talk Relationships and Joins

gikonyo-v — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 13:01:44 +0000

Here's something nobody tells you when you start Power BI: the visuals are the easy part.

You can figure out a bar chart in ten minutes. But the moment your data comes from more than one table and nothing is adding up correctly, that's where most beginners quietly panic. I know I did.

Relationships and joins. Here's what they actually mean.

Why Your Tables Need to Talk to Each Other
Imagine you work at a retail shop. You have two lists:

A Customers table - names, IDs, locations
A Sales table - order IDs, amounts, and the customer ID for each purchase.

These two tables live separately. But when your boss asks "which customers spent the most last month?", now you need both. You can't answer that question with just one table.

That's what a relationship does in Power BI. It creates a bridge between two tables so they can work together in your reports.

The Key Concept: Primary and Foreign Keys
Every relationship needs a common column. A column that appears in both tables.
Like in our tables above
Customers table has CustomerID. This is the primary key ,unique per customer.
Sales table has CustomerID too. This is the foreign key,it references the customer.

Power BI uses this shared column to match rows across tables. When you drag CustomerName from one table and TotalSales from another into the same visual, the relationship is what makes them line up correctly.

Star Schema. The One You'll Use Most
Power BI works best with a star schema. One central table called the fact table surrounded by supporting tables called dimension tables.

Real-world example:

Fact table: Sales - every transaction, with amounts and IDs
Dimension tables: Customers, Products, Dates, Regions

The Sales table connects to all of them. From this setup you can answer:
What product sold most in Nairobi in Q1? Pulling from Products, Regions, Dates, and Sales all at once.
It looks like a star on the model view. Hence the name.

Join Types. What Gets Included?
When two tables connect, Power BI needs to know what to do when there's no match. That's where join types come in.

Inner Join - only rows that match in both tables. A customer with no sales? Gone. A sale with no matching customer? Also gone. Strictest filter.

Left Outer Join - keeps everything from the left table, matches where possible. All customers appear, even those who never bought anything. Their sales columns just show blank.

Full Outer Join - keeps everything from both tables, matches where it can. Nothing gets left out.

Real-world use: if you're building a report to find customers who haven't purchased yet, a Left Join is your answer. Inner Join would erase them entirely.

How It Changes Your Reports
Once your relationships are set correctly, Power BI does the heavy lifting. Your slicers filter across tables automatically. Your totals actually make sense. A date filter on your calendar table combs through sales, products, and regions, because the relationships connect them.

Without this? You're just making pretty charts on broken data. Again, learned it the hard way.

Get the relationships right first. Everything else follows.

What tripped you up most when you first set up relationships in Power BI? Drop it below.

Let's Talk Excel

gikonyo-v — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 14:13:51 +0000

Excel Isn't Just Grid and Tables. Here's What It Actually Does.

First time I opened Excel, I stared at a blank grid of rows and columns and thought what am I supposed to do with this? Up until recently, I've learned how create and analyze data in excel. So, let's talk about it...

What Excel Actually Is
Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet software that lets you collect, organize, analyze, calculate, and visualize data. The interface looks simple at first, you know, rows running horizontally, columns labeled A, B, C running vertically, and cells where they intersect. But that humble grid is the foundation of some seriously powerful work.

In real life, Excel shows up in:
Financial reporting. Most businesses if not all, use Excel to track budgets, building up income statements, and monitor cash flow. It's powerful isn't just storing numbers, it's the fact that formulas actually update automatically. Change one figure and everything connected to it recalculates stat.

Sorting + filtering data. Imagine you have a ton of customer orders and need to find every sale above KES 1,000 from Beginning of the year or month. Excel's filter feature lets you do that in seconds, you can hide irrelevant rows and show exactly what you need. Even sorting by what you want to work with, be it date, by amount, by region etc., any order you choose.

Tracking and grading performance. Teachers use Excel to manage student scores. With functions like =AVERAGE(), =MEAN(), and =MIN(), a user can instantly find a class average, the mean score, or flag who needs extra support without touching a calculator.

What stuck with me is;

SUM and AVERAGE functions. These were my entry point. Instead of adding numbers manually, =SUM(B1:B5) adds an entire range in one shot. =AVERAGE(B1:B5) gives the mean. Simple, but the moment you see a formula update when you change a cell value, that's when it clicks.

Conditional Formatting. This one was eye opener. You set a rule, say; highlight any score below 50 in red, and Excel does it automatically across hundreds of rows. It turns a wall of numbers into something you can visualize at a glance. I used it to errors, and the thing works like Sherlock Holmes.

Cell References + Dragging. This had me raising an eyebrow at first. When you drag a formula down, Excel adjusts the references automatically. Once I understood this, my formulas stopped breaking in mysterious ways.

It actually changing how I view data.Learning Excel isn't just teaching me a tool, it's changing how I think.

I now look at information differently. A list of sales figures isn't just numbers, it's more than information, it's actual data, waiting to be sorted, filtered, and summarized. A column of names with inconsistent formatting isn't a mess, it is a =PROPER() function away from being clean.

I'm still learning. But I've gone from staring blankly at a grid to actually asking questions and getting answers.
And that's not a small thing.

Which Excel concept surprised you the most when it finally made sense? Drop it below.

DEV Community: gikonyo-v

Let's Talk Relationships and Joins

Let's Talk Excel