Data Analyst Portfolio Projects (2026)

Portfolio projects that mirror a data analyst's week: KPI dashboards, cohort and funnel analysis, segmentation, forecasting and reporting, in SQL, Excel, Power BI and Python.

26 projects: 8 beginner, 12 intermediate, 6 advanced. Every step is checked as you go, an AI mentor helps when you are stuck, and you finish with a verifiable certificate.

Data analyst projects

Risk Register Dashboards in Power BI — Develop a robust understanding of Power BI's features and functionalities, including data transformation, visualization techniques, and best practices for dashboard creation. (beginner · $1)
Dashboard Design Principles: Building BI Dashboards People Actually Use — Learn why most BI dashboards get built once and ignored, and how to design dashboards people actually open, trust, and use to make real decisions. (beginner · $1.50)
Data-Driven Decision Making: Excel and SQL for Business Analysts — Follow business analyst Renata Cruz as she uses Excel, pivot tables, and SQL to answer real Cobalt Bicycles questions - and catch the analysis mistakes that mislead decisions. (beginner · $1.25)
Financial Statement Analysis: Reading a 10-K Like an Investor — Learn to read a 10-K like an analyst: income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow mechanics, ratio analysis, red flags, and a full worked example. (beginner · $1.25)
Business Intelligence Dashboards: Turning Data into a Board-Ready Story — Follow business analyst Maya Ferreira as she builds Thistle & Co's board dashboard - choosing the right metrics, cutting chart junk, and defending the numbers to a skeptical board member. (intermediate · $1.25)
Data Engineering Capstone: Ingestion to Dashboard End to End — Follow a data engineer building a full pipeline for a growing retailer: extract sources, load a warehouse, transform clean models, orchestrate with alerts, and ship a BI dashboard. (advanced · $2.50)
Sales Pipeline Cleanup and Weighted Forecast in Excel — Clean a CRM export and build a weighted sales forecast in Excel: text amounts, duplicates, stage names, win rate, stale deals and coverage. Then direct your own AI to do it, and catch its mistakes. (beginner · $1)
SOC Fundamentals: SIEM, Log Analysis, and Alert Triage — Learn what a SOC does, how a SIEM ingests and correlates logs, and how to triage failed logins, malware, and traffic alerts as true positives or false positives, through a real SOC story. (beginner · $1)
Analytics Engineering Fundamentals: Modeling Data for BI Consumption — Learn to transform raw data into clean, trusted, BI-ready tables through staging, intermediate, and mart layers, with real SQL, semantic consistency, and dbt-style testing. (intermediate · $1.50)
Database Design and Indexing for Analytics Workloads — Follow engineer Dara Okonkwo fixing a real Postgres analytics database: column types, composite and covering indexes, partitioning, materialized views, and diagnosing slow queries with EXPLAIN. (intermediate · $1.50)
Real-Time Analytics: Streaming Data From Kafka Into a Warehouse Dashboard — Learn when real-time analytics beats batch, then stream Kafka events into a warehouse table and build a live, deduplicated dashboard with lag monitoring and outage recovery. (advanced · $2)
SQL for HR: Attrition Analysis from an HR Database — Work out headcount, attrition by department and tenure, exit reasons, manager hot spots and a board-ready headcount bridge in SQL. Then direct your own AI through the same job and catch its mistakes. (intermediate · $1.25)
Audit Analytics in Python: Duplicate Payments, Benford's Law and Journal-Entry Testing — Test a full year of vendor payments and journal entries with pandas: duplicate payments, Benford's law and journal-entry tests. Then direct your AI through the same audit and catch its mistakes. (advanced · $2)
Building a Metrics Layer for Self-Service Analytics — Learn to build a metrics layer so every team gets the same revenue and user numbers, no matter which BI tool they use. (advanced · $2)
Exploratory Data Analysis in Python: Bike-Share Demand in the Monsoon — Explore six weeks of real-looking bike-share trips and weather with pandas and matplotlib, find what the data really says, then direct your AI through the same analysis and catch its mistakes. (intermediate · $1.25)
PivotTables and Dashboards: Build an Operations KPI Dashboard — Replace a hand-typed weekly KPI email with a refreshable Excel dashboard: PivotTables, calculated fields, slicers, timelines and GETPIVOTDATA, then hand next quarter to your AI and verify it. (intermediate · $1.25)
SQL for E-commerce: Funnel Conversion and Cohort Retention — Build a D2C brand's conversion funnel, new-versus-returning split, cohort retention grid and source scorecard in SQL. Then direct your own AI through the same job and catch its mistakes. (intermediate · $1.25)
Budget vs Actual in Excel: Variance Analysis for a Bakery — Build a bakery's monthly budget-vs-actual report from its ledger: lookups, SUMIFS, variance %, F/A flags, materiality and a flexed budget. Then direct your own AI and catch its mistakes. (beginner · $1)
Customer Segmentation in Python: RFM Scores and k-Means Clustering — Segment an online store's customers with pandas and scikit-learn: RFM scores, named segments and k-means clusters. Then direct your AI through the same job and catch its mistakes. (advanced · $2)
Digital Marketing Analytics: From Campaign Data to ROI — Follow growth marketer Priya Nair as she untangles attribution myths, reads a real ad dashboard, and calculates the CAC, LTV, and ROAS behind an $80K budget reallocation. (intermediate · $1.25)
Dynamic Arrays and What-If Analysis: Build an Inventory Reorder Planner — Build an Excel inventory reorder planner with FILTER, XLOOKUP, LET, Goal Seek and Data Tables, then direct your AI to do the same job and catch what it gets wrong. (intermediate · $1.25)
Email A/B Testing in Python: Is the Uplift Real? — Analyse a real-looking email A/B test with pandas and SciPy, prove whether the uplift is real, then direct your AI through the same analysis and catch its mistakes. (intermediate · $1.25)
Operations Management: Process Analysis and Bottleneck Diagnosis — Follow operations analyst Dara Kessler as she maps ClearField Optical Lab's workflow, times every station, finds the real bottleneck, and redesigns the process to hit turnaround targets. (intermediate · $1.25)
Sales Forecasting in Python: Beat the Baselines on a Hidden Future — Turn three years of messy daily sales into an honest weekly demand forecast with pandas and NumPy, backtest it against baselines, then direct your AI through the same job and catch its mistakes. (advanced · $2)
Power BI HR People Analytics: Headcount, Attrition and Hiring Funnel — Build Saptak Software Labs' people dashboard in the in-browser Power BI lab: headcount on any date, attrition on average headcount, tenure bands and the hiring funnel in DAX, checked on your own data. (intermediate · $1.25)
SQL for Product Analytics: DAU, MAU, Stickiness and Feature Adoption in a Food-Delivery App — Measure a food-delivery app's active users, stickiness, feature adoption and first-order funnel from its events table in SQL, then direct your own AI and catch its mistakes. (beginner · $1)

Practise data analyst more

Data analyst job simulation: A simulated analyst workday: real requests, real data, scored work.
Free SQL playground: Write and run SQL against a sample database in your browser. No login.
Power BI course: Power BI from beginner to advanced: Power Query, data models, DAX and reports.

Frequently asked questions

How many projects does a data analyst portfolio need?

Three to five strong projects usually beat ten small ones: one SQL analysis, one dashboard, one spreadsheet model and one Python analysis cover what most analyst roles ask for.

Do I need to install anything for these data analyst projects?

Most projects run in labs inside your browser (SQL, Excel, Python, Power BI, Git and more). Cloud projects say up front when they use your own AWS account or a simulator instead.

How is a Bartman project different from a tutorial?

You do the work yourself, step by step. Each step is checked automatically, and an AI mentor helps when you are stuck, so you finish with work you can show rather than a video you watched.

Do I get a certificate?

Yes. Finishing a project earns a certificate with its own ID that anyone can verify on bartman.ai.

What is Bartman?

Bartman (bartman.ai) is a learning platform where you build real projects with an AI mentor, practise in free browser labs, take mock tests and practice exams, and run job simulations. It was founded in 2025 and is based in Hyderabad, India.