Every week I interview freshers at EVIKA Academy who say "I know Excel and SQL but I have no projects to show." A portfolio is not optional in 2026 — interviewers at Delhi NCR companies will ask you to walk them through something you built. This guide gives you 10 ready-to-start ideas, the exact datasets to use, and what to build so you never have to say that again.
Why a Portfolio Matters More Than Your Certificate
A certificate tells an interviewer you completed a course. A portfolio tells them you can actually do the job. Every data analyst interview at a serious company in Delhi NCR — Genpact, Deloitte, HCL, Capgemini — includes a technical round where they ask you to explain a project or solve a small problem on the spot.
Freshers with two good projects get interview calls. Freshers with zero projects do not — regardless of their certificate or marks.
📗 Excel (3 projects)🗄️ SQL (2 projects)📊 Power BI (3 projects)🐍 Python (2 projects)
Project 1Beginner⏱ 1–2 days
E-Commerce Sales Dashboard in Excel
ExcelPivot TablesCharts
Build a complete sales performance dashboard showing monthly revenue, top products, regional breakdown, and profit margins. Use Pivot Tables, slicers, and dynamic charts to make it interactive.
WHAT TO BUILD:
✓Monthly and quarterly revenue trend chart
✓Top 10 products by sales and profit
✓Region-wise performance map using conditional formatting
✓Customer segment analysis (Consumer vs Corporate vs Home Office)
✓Profit margin calculator with dynamic filters
💡 WHY THIS PROJECT WORKS IN INTERVIEWS: Every company that interviews data analysts will ask "have you built dashboards in Excel?" This project gives you a concrete, impressive answer — not just "yes I know Excel."
Learn Excel Course at EVIKA →Project 2Beginner⏱ 2–3 days
SQL Sales Analysis — E-Commerce Database
SQLMySQL
Write SQL queries to analyse order data, customer behaviour, delivery performance, and seller rankings. This dataset has 8 relational tables — perfect for practising joins and subqueries.
📦 Dataset:Brazilian E-Commerce Dataset by Olist (Kaggle — free)Download Free → WHAT TO BUILD:
✓Monthly order volume and revenue trend
✓Average delivery time by state and seller
✓Top sellers by revenue and rating
✓Customer repeat purchase rate (cohort analysis basics)
✓Product category performance ranking using window functions
💡 WHY THIS PROJECT WORKS IN INTERVIEWS: SQL projects on multi-table datasets are the #1 thing interviewers look for. This dataset mimics the actual structure of production databases at e-commerce companies like Flipkart.
Learn SQL Course at EVIKA →Project 3Beginner⏱ 2–3 days
HR Analytics Dashboard in Power BI
Power BIDAXPower Query
Build an interactive HR dashboard showing attrition rate, department-wise headcount, salary bands, and employee satisfaction scores. Use DAX to calculate turnover rates and averages.
📦 Dataset:IBM HR Analytics Employee Attrition Dataset (Kaggle — free)Download Free → WHAT TO BUILD:
✓Overall attrition rate KPI card
✓Attrition by department, age group, and job role
✓Salary distribution by education and experience
✓Employee satisfaction score heatmap
✓Drill-through page for individual department analysis
💡 WHY THIS PROJECT WORKS IN INTERVIEWS: HR analytics is a top use case for Power BI in companies across Delhi NCR. Genpact, Wipro, HCL all use similar dashboards daily. Showing this in an interview signals job-readiness immediately.
Learn Power BI Course at EVIKA →Project 4Beginner⏱ 2–3 days
COVID-19 Data Analysis with Python
PythonPandasMatplotlibSeaborn
Analyse global COVID case trends, vaccination rates, and mortality data using Python. Clean messy real-world data, handle missing values, and create publication-quality charts.
📦 Dataset:Our World in Data COVID-19 Dataset (free, updated regularly)Download Free → WHAT TO BUILD:
✓Country-wise case trajectory line plots
✓Vaccination rate vs mortality correlation chart
✓Top 10 affected countries bar chart (animated or static)
✓India-specific wave analysis with annotations
✓Rolling 7-day average calculation using Pandas
💡 WHY THIS PROJECT WORKS IN INTERVIEWS: This is the most widely-used beginner Python project because the dataset is real, messy, and large enough to demonstrate actual data cleaning skills — not just toy examples.
Learn Python Course at EVIKA →Project 5Intermediate⏱ 2 days
Financial Sales Report — Excel + Power Query
ExcelPower QueryPivot Tables
Use Power Query to clean and transform financial data, then build an MIS-style monthly sales report with Pivot Tables and charts. Automate refresh so the report updates when data changes.
📦 Dataset:Microsoft Financial Sample Excel Workbook (free from Microsoft)Download Free → WHAT TO BUILD:
✓Power Query pipeline to clean and load data automatically
✓P&L summary table by product and segment
✓Month-on-month growth tracker with conditional formatting
✓Budget vs actual variance dashboard
✓Auto-refresh mechanism — new data updates all charts instantly
💡 WHY THIS PROJECT WORKS IN INTERVIEWS: Finance and MIS roles across Delhi NCR use exactly this workflow daily. This project directly mimics what a reporting analyst does at HDFC, Bajaj, or any BFSI company.
Learn Excel Course at EVIKA →Project 6Intermediate⏱ 3 days
Retail Customer Segmentation using SQL + Excel
SQLExcelPivot Tables
Use SQL to calculate RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary) scores for customers, then segment them into High Value, At-Risk, and New Customer categories. Visualise the segments in Excel.
📦 Dataset:Online Retail Dataset (UCI Machine Learning Repository — free)Download Free → WHAT TO BUILD:
✓SQL queries to calculate Recency, Frequency, Monetary scores per customer
✓Customer tier segmentation (Gold, Silver, Bronze)
✓At-risk customer identification query
✓Excel pivot showing revenue by segment over time
✓Business recommendations slide or summary table
💡 WHY THIS PROJECT WORKS IN INTERVIEWS: RFM analysis is a real technique used by e-commerce and retail analytics teams. Mentioning it in an interview — with a working project — puts you ahead of 90% of freshers.
Learn SQL Course at EVIKA →Project 7Intermediate⏱ 3–4 days
Supply Chain Performance Dashboard in Power BI
Power BIDAXPower Query
Build a multi-page Power BI report tracking supplier performance, on-time delivery rates, order fulfilment, and inventory levels. Use time intelligence DAX to show trends over rolling periods.
WHAT TO BUILD:
✓Delivery on-time rate KPI by supplier and region
✓Order fulfilment cycle time trend
✓Inventory turnover calculation using DAX measures
✓Late delivery risk indicator using conditional formatting
✓Executive summary page with drill-through to details
💡 WHY THIS PROJECT WORKS IN INTERVIEWS: Supply chain analytics is one of the top hiring domains in Noida — with companies like HCL, Marico, and FMCG firms constantly recruiting. This project signals direct domain relevance.
Learn Power BI Course at EVIKA →Project 8Intermediate⏱ 3 days
Movie Recommendation & Sentiment EDA in Python
PythonPandasSeabornWordCloud
Perform full exploratory data analysis on 5,000+ movies — revenue trends, genre popularity, runtime distribution, and top directors. Generate a word cloud of movie descriptions and correlation heatmaps.
WHAT TO BUILD:
✓Revenue and budget distribution charts (log scale)
✓Genre popularity over decades
✓Top 20 directors by average rating
✓Correlation heatmap between budget, runtime, revenue, and rating
✓Word cloud of movie keywords and descriptions
💡 WHY THIS PROJECT WORKS IN INTERVIEWS: EDA projects on large, rich datasets prove Python fluency far better than simple exercises. The word cloud and heatmap sections give you visually impressive slides for your portfolio.
Learn Python Course at EVIKA →Project 9Advanced⏱ 4–5 days
End-to-End Sales Analytics: SQL → Power BI
SQLPower BIDAX
Build the full analyst workflow: write SQL queries to extract and aggregate sales data from a multi-table database, then connect Power BI directly to SQL to build a live sales intelligence dashboard.
WHAT TO BUILD:
✓SQL views for sales summary, product performance, customer lifetime value
✓Live DirectQuery connection from Power BI to SQL
✓Sales territory performance dashboard with geo map
✓Product profitability matrix (price vs margin)
✓Month-over-month growth DAX measures with time intelligence
💡 WHY THIS PROJECT WORKS IN INTERVIEWS: This project demonstrates the full analyst workflow in one piece — SQL for data extraction, Power BI for reporting. It is the single most impressive project a fresher can show because it replicates exactly what analysts do at real companies.
Learn Power BI Course at EVIKA →Project 10Beginner⏱ 1–2 days
Personal Finance Dashboard — Excel + Power BI
ExcelPower BI
Build a personal finance tracker that categorises expenses, tracks savings, and visualises spending patterns. Use your own transaction data or create a realistic sample dataset.
📦 Dataset:Create your own (use your own bank statements or sample data)
WHAT TO BUILD:
✓Monthly income vs expense summary
✓Category-wise spending breakdown (food, travel, utilities, etc.)
✓Savings rate tracker month by month
✓Budget vs actual comparison with traffic-light indicators
✓Annual financial summary one-pager
💡 WHY THIS PROJECT WORKS IN INTERVIEWS: Interviewers love this project because the data is personal and the story is genuinely yours. It also demonstrates that you can apply data analytics to real problems beyond corporate datasets — which shows initiative.
Learn Excel Course at EVIKA →How to Present Your Projects in an Interview
Building the project is 60% of the work. Presenting it well is the other 40%. Follow this structure when an interviewer asks you to walk them through a project:
1
The Business Problem
Start with the problem, not the tool. "I analysed sales data to identify which product categories were losing margin over Q3 and Q4." Not: "I built a dashboard in Power BI."
2
The Dataset
Describe the data — size, source, quality issues. "The dataset had 100,000 orders across 3 years, with about 8% missing delivery dates that I handled using Power Query."
3
Your Approach
Explain what you did, step by step. Mention specific techniques — joins, DAX measures, Pandas groupby — without sounding like a glossary.
4
The Finding
What did you discover? "Office supplies showed a consistent margin decline of 12% from Q2 to Q4, driven by a single supplier category." Numbers make findings credible.
5
The Business Recommendation
What would you suggest based on your finding? This is what separates an analyst from a data entry operator — you draw conclusions, not just charts.
📁 Where to Host Your Portfolio
GitHub
For SQL scripts, Python notebooks (.ipynb), and any code-based project
Power BI Public
Publish Power BI dashboards publicly — share the link in your resume
Google Drive / OneDrive
For Excel dashboards — share view-only link
LinkedIn
Post screenshots of your dashboard with a short write-up. Gets you visibility.
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Want to Build These Projects with Guidance?
At EVIKA Academy, every student builds 5+ portfolio projects during the course — with trainer feedback, dataset access, and presentation coaching included. Your portfolio is ready before you even start applying.
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