2021 Week 13 | Power BI: Create a Bubble Chart with a Custom Overlay

Introduction

Welcome back for Week 13 of Workout Wednesday, Power BI edition. If you’re joining us for the first time, welcome! 

This week was inspired by the Tableau challenge from week 11, where Lorna recreated one of my all-time favorite data visualizations – Hans Rosling’s moving bubble chart. Check out the week 11 challenge and join us this week in Power BI, where we’ll be creating the same visualization and including a custom overlay. 

If you have never seen the Ted Talk or the clip from the Joy of Stats – I can almost guarantee you will enjoy it! Use this for inspiration for this week’s challenge. As you might guess, life expectancy increases as average income increases.

The custom overlay is something that I like to use to give end users instructions or more information about the report. The exercise below is a starting point and I would love to hear/see other examples on social media!

Requirements

  • Connect to the Data.World curated dataset, which contains 4 tables
  • Bring all tables into Power BI and create a data model.
    • Ensure that the income, life expectancy, and population tables are related to the data geographies table.
  • Build a bubble chart that shows life expectancy by average income over time
    •  Ensure that the colors in your bubble chart represent Region and the size of the bubble represents population size
  • Build a custom page overlay that gives additional details to end-users about the data included in the report. Do not be afraid to be creative – this does not need to look like the sample! (hint: use a button and bookmark)
  • Create a button on your report page that will allow users to display the custom overlay (the question mark in the sample)
  • Are there any countries with an income over 50k that have an average life expectancy lower than 74?

Dataset

This week uses data from GapMinder. For ease of use, Lorna has put all of the required tables on Data.World. Use the Data.World connector to load the data directly in to Power BI. 

This challenge involves a bit of data prep. Unpivot is the key to success.

Share

After you finish your workout, share on Twitter using the hashtags #WOW2021 and #PowerBI, and tag @JSBaucke@MMarie, @shan_gsd and @dataveldAlso make sure to fill out the Submission Tracker so that we can count you as a participant this week in order to track our participation throughout the year. 

If you also did the Tableau week 11 challenge, we encourage you to post screenshots of the side-by-side products!

Solution

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