My First Power Bi Dashboard Project

Stop doubting, time to start a project.

How did I start my first dashboard project?

I was only four days into learning Power Bi or data visualization in general. On LinkedIn, I saw Ian Klosowicz, one of my favorite Data Analysts, post about a dashboard challenge. Ian assisted me in shaping a roadmap for becoming a data analyst. I began learning SQL and Power BI on his advice. He made a post about his dataset and hosted a dashboard challenge. Despite the fact that I knew practically nothing about it, I chose to participate. I worked on the project you see in the picture for 5 days.

Step 1: Data cleaning and transformation

The first and most important thing you should do before beginning the visualization is to clean up your data. And you begin by observing your data to determine how you can transform it later to meet your visualization needs. The dataset was titled “Aliens of America” and contained three worksheets.

Let’s look at Ian’s question:

So I used Power Bi to clean and transform the data, including removing blank cells and duplicates. Then I realized I could model the data using their respective IDs. Not sure if what I did was correct. I was only trying it out.

Step 2: Visualizing the data with charts & graphs

As a beginner, I mostly dragged and dropped to create my first dashboard. And it’s a lot of fun and excitement when you start working on your first project.

As shown in the image below, the dataset contained information on 50K aliens with an average age of 118. To calculate the average age, I used “gauge” from the visualization pane.

Q-1: If these aliens were hostile

I used this ribbon chart to determine whether or not those aliens were hostile, and then I summarized the data to get the information in the text box. As you can see, the number of hostile aliens was relatively low. With a percentage of 5.46%, Texas had the highest concentration of hostile or aggressive aliens, whereas Vermont had the lowest concentration of aliens overall.

Q-2: Their diet

The image above depicts aggressive and non-aggressive aliens’ top five favorite foods when they were around 118 years old.

So I came to the conclusion that we could try feeding them food like Cattle Egret, Lapwing, whale, blue crane, painted stork, and so on to keep those hostile aliens sane.

I also created some additional visualizations for their occupation and type because I wanted to include that information in my dashboard.

I also had a food frequency matrix prepared, which I don’t believe was of any use. Let me know if you find this useful.

Conclusion:

Working on my first dashboard was a lot of fun. I learned a lot and tried to do one visualization every day. Every time I was stuck, I looked things up on Google and YouTube. Watching others create dashboards and come up with reasons for using different visualizations provided me with a wealth of data visualization knowledge.

If you want to play around with this dataset and try out different types of visualizations, you can get it here: Aliens of America.

If you have any questions or suggestions, please say hello on Linkedin.