It's day 2 of dashboard week and today we were tasked with making a dashboard using PowerBI. Since we have only used PowerBI once a few weeks ago this was definitely challenging. Simple things that would have taken me a few seconds to do in Tableau took me a long time to achieve in PowerBI which ate up a lot of my time. Here's how it went:
Planning + Data Prep:
Since the dataset I was working with was fairly small, planning what my dashboard would look like didn't take me very long. I was working on a SEO Analytics dataset so I sketched up a quick idea of what I wanted to include and moved onto the data preparation.
To build the donut chart I had envisioned in the sketch I needed to I need to pivot some columns into rows. Unfortunately I had no idea how to do this in PowerBI and I didn't want eat into too much time figuring that out so I built a quick workflow in Tableau prep and outputted the data.
Building the Dashboard
Due to the way the data was structured, I could not get the interactivity I wanted to without spending more time than I could afford too on data preparation, so without taking interactivity into account here's what I liked and disliked about dashboard building in PowerBI.
Likes:
- Building visualisations is very quick and easy because of PowerBI's more fleshed out version of Tableau's 'show me'.
- Managing dashboard layout is very easy since you can drag and drop vizzes anywhere without having to worry about misalignment/scaling issues when uploading it.
Dislikes:
- PowerBI has very little labelling options, to get my sparklines only to show the start and end labels required some complex calculations and some strange workarounds.
- Formatting options seem to be hidden in many nested layers of dropdowns, meaning getting my dashboard to look how I wanted it to was quite time consuming.
- Creating working calculations proved to be quite difficult, although I felt the same way with Tableau when I first started out.
Presentation
Due to the time crunch I wasn't able to throw together slides to present with today. I decided I would give a walkthrough of my thought process, demonstrating why I made certain decisions with my data preparation and chart choices.
Overall I enjoyed day 2 of dashboard week. Whilst it was quite challenging working with PowerBI I feel I have learnt a lot about the software and look forward to building more with it in the future.
You can see my final dashboard here: https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Data-Stories-Gallery/SEO-Analytics-Dashboard/m-p/3040735