Time Series Forecasting Dataset in Power BI

[Imagauthamam]

I'm trying to do time series forecasting in Power BI. 

Before I start doing it, I have some doubts in how we can Prepare source dataset.

Just want to understand the structure of data.

Let's say I have a department and in each department there are multiple Teams, I want to time series forecasting on Total Sales By each department.

I can prepare the data in the below options:

Most of the tutorials which I have seen online is using Option 2. But I prefer Option 1

Because in future if there are more new departments coming 1, then it can be added at the row level, whereas in Option-2 I need to add more and more columns each time.

My Question is :

1. Can I use the structure in Option-1 for preparing my dataset?

2. If Yes, in the Date column, I can see 1st June has 3 records for each team in a department. So is there any condition whether a row should have a date only once? 

3. In Option-1, Let's say I want to predict total sales By department. Will adding a addition column like Team Name have any impact while preparing models for time series forecasting?

I would be really glad if someone could help. Thanks in advance.

[lbendlin · Accepted solution]

1. Option1 is by far the better option.

2. Add an index column if you are concerned about disambiguation

3. no, in fact it will help tune the predictor engine.