Month / April 2019

by anthonysmoak

Power BI Dashboard Tutorial: Year over Year Difference Analysis

I want you to increase your efficiency and to stop using spreadsheets for every single analysis.

Everybody works with time series data at some point in time. Year over year (also known as YoY) analysis is one of the most useful analyses you can perform to determine changes, analyze growth and recognize trends in quantity on an annual basis.

Unfortunately, most data preparers are used to performing some unaesthetic flavor of this analysis using only Excel (looking at you FP&A). Without the benefit of using visualization to easily recognize trends, data consumers are forced to work harder to tease out the most salient information.

If you have access to Power BI Desktop (available for free), then you can perform a tabular year over year difference calculation and then tie that information to a bar chart that will help you visualize the variances.

In this video I will show you how to create a calendar table in DAX (Microsoft’s formula expression language) and use that table to enable a year over year analysis of customer orders at fictional Stark Industries. You don’t need to be an expert in DAX to take advantage, just type in the date calendar formula you see in the video and tweak the simple calculations to fit your data.

You could obviously perform a simple YoY analysis in Excel, but I want you to stay relevant and learn something new!

If you find this type of instruction valuable make sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel.

All views and opinions are solely my own and do NOT necessarily reflect those of my employer.

by anthonysmoak

Tableau Dashboard Tutorial: Dot Strip Plot

In this video tutorial I describe a dashboard that I put together that displays the distribution of various NBA player statistics. I use the always handy parameter to enable the user to choose which statistics are displayed on the dashboard. Although I’m showing sports statistics measures in this dashboard, it could easily be repurposed to show the distribution of a variety of business related metrics.

I break the dashboard up into three areas: histogram, dot strip plot, and heat map. In the second part of the video, I describe in detail how to build out a jittered dot strip plot. The benefit of the jittered dot strip plot is that the marks representing NBA players obstruct each other much less as compared to the linear dot strip plot.

Techniques used in the dashboard were previous outlined in my Ultimate Slope Graph and How to Use Jittering in Tableau (Scattered Data Points) posts.

Feel free to head to my Tableau Public page and download the workbook for yourself. Drop me a line in the comments or on YouTube if you learned something.

As always, do great things with your data!

If you find this type of instruction valuable make sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel.

All views and opinions are solely my own and do NOT necessarily reflect those of my employer.