Question

An analyst receives three monthly sales exports from different regional systems: one CSV, one tab-delimited TXT, and one Excel workbook. All three contain the same columns in the same order (Date, Region, Product, Amount) but were generated by separate teams. The analyst needs to combine all rows into a single dataset for a company-wide report. Which transformation approach is most appropriate?

Accepted Answer

Union (append) the three files after standardizing their formats and column structure

Answer

Perform an inner join across the three files on the Product column

Answer

Pivot each file from long to wide format before merging on Date

Answer

Cross join the three files to ensure every combination of rows is captured