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Georgia Exports in Power BI

·390 words·2 mins
Table of Contents

Describing Export Statistics using Power BI
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You may already know that Exports from Georgia contribute between $35-40 billion to our state economy each year. But have you ever wondered – What do these Georgia products look like? 

This blog article and attached video is an effort to answer that question. It uses a free tool from Microsoft called Power BI to slice and dice the detailed monthly export data that is available from the US Census. 

What Does the Power BI Tool Show?
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I’ve previously retrieved this Census data for 2013-2018 and ended up with a 2.4 million row data set in SQL Server. While it is all well and good to have the raw data - the trick is putting that data in a format end users can easily navigate and learn from. On this score, PowerBI delivers. 

18Nov29_CensusPBI.png

The video shows how Power BI can generate:

  • Full year summaries from 2013-2018
  • Filtered summaries by commodity types (known as Harmonized Codes)

For the selected date and commodity classes, it then tells you:

  • Total sales 
  • Shipping method by export value (USD)
  • Shipping method by weight
  • Top 10 destination countries
  • Monthly sales trends from 2014-2018.

Export Data Terms
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If you’ve not worked with export data before, there are two data topics that deserve explanation:



18Nov29_CensusSQL.png

Harmonized Codes
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In the demonstration you’ll see that exports are classified using the Harmonized System. This is an internationally agreed-to taxonomy for naming merchandise and commodities. It is hierarchical starting from 22 “sections” and then proceeding to increasingly more specific detail. The data presented here includes section, 2-digit, 4-digit and 6-digit classifications. For more explanation of these codes, you may find this link useful.

Origin of Movement
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Data is limited to transactions in which Georgia is the “Origin of Movement.” In other words – only merchandise that starts it’s journey in Georgia is reported here. There is a more detailed explanation from the Census on this topic.  

Summary
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The port of Savannah and Atlanta Hartsfield airport are two assets that help our Georgia export-economy. In similar fashion, data and tools like Power BI can be an asset for your company. As shown here, PowerBI makes digging into a large data set more informative and productive.  

Please call or email if we can help you harness any of these Microsoft data tools.  

Jonathan Bartleson
Author
Jonathan Bartleson

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