INTRODUCTION
With the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, several high-profile dashboards have been created using data from around the world. Since Power BI is a new tool, I thought it would be a good opportunity to develop a simple COVID-19 dashboard using it using existing data.
We will use this opportunity to create the following dashboard:
DATA
Data for this tutorial came from Our World in Data (OWID) GitHub site. You can download a version of the data that focuses on the United States from my Dropbox folder. There are a lot of variables in this dataset; however, the codebook for all of the variables is located here.
POWER BI TUTORIAL
Step 1. Download data
The data for the United States is located here. Download this to a convenient location.
Step 2. Loading the data into Power BI
When you start Power BI, select the “Get data.” Make sure you click on the Excel format and then click on “Connect.” Locate the data where you saved it and then in the Navigator window, select “Sheet 1.” Make sure to Load the data to complete the process.
Step 3. Plotting total deaths
In the Visualizations panel, select the link chart. In the Fields panel, you can select the “data” variable. However, we will not use the built-in hierarchy. Instead, we will use the date order (e.g., January 1, 2020; January 2, 2020; January 3, 2020; etc).
After you have selected the date for the X-axis, the next variable is the Total Deaths.
Step 4. Change the labels
The current visualization uses the default labels. However, we can change these in the Visualization panel.
To change the name of the visual, you will need to use the Format option
Once you’ve done these steps, the first visualization should be nearly complete. Additional edits to the visualization can be done using the Format (paint roller icon) such as the background color and line color.
Step 6. Include the Card text
You can add additional visualization such as the number of deaths using the card feature in the Visualization panel.
Step 7. Repeat steps for the other visualizations
You can repeat these steps for the other COVID-19 metrics (e.g., new deaths, total cases, and number of new cases).
Once you have added all the visualizations to your dashboard, you will hopefully get something like the example below.
CONCLUSIONS
Power BI makes it very convenient to build dashboards using available data. Other software are also available, so I would recommend exploring them. However, I would also encourage you to explore other dashboards that are created using Power BI; Microsoft has a library of great examples. By using the methods presented in this tutorial, you can build other dashboards using different types of data.
Files used in this tutorial are available here.
REFERENCES
Data for this tutorial came from the Our World in Data GitHub site.