Jump into PowerBI!

T-SQL Tuesday #75 Invitation: Jump into Power BI!

At first look at PowerBI I immediately knew I wanted to use some of the more interesting visualizations like the Map.  I'm also well of the viral video status of Hans Roslings TED talk, so I also looked for some sort of timeline visualization.  Although not a native visualization I did find the Timeline custom visual. 

In an effort to find some fun data to play with that would incorporate both the map visual and the timeline visual, I searched and searched and then I found the perfect data set at the national ufo reporting center.

Although it's no Gapminder visualization, I did manage to put this all together very quickly.  I also played around with the PowerBI embedded feature, but I think PowerBI looks much better in its own full screen browser window.

That said, here's what I put together.

Be sure to use the tabs at the bottom.  I found it fun to zoom into my state and look for local sightings.  (You can zoom in and out on the map with your mouse wheel).  You can also click on a date or select a range to see what happened in that time frame.  The timeline has a year, quarter, month, and day quick drill capability via the Y, Q, M, D buttons on the right.  On the 2015 and 2016 tabs you can click on a month and see the location distribution and total count for the month.  One thing I did notice was that there is an alert on my PowerBI which states: "Too many values.  Not showing all data."  I wonder what the data volume thresholds are.  For my report there are around 7000 rows in an excel spreadsheet that I imported.

If you're looking for data to play with there's a fertility data set here.