May the POWER BI with you [Star Wars Day Viz]

It is star wars day. Let’s celebrate the ultimate nerd day of known universe in a way that resonates with us. Let’s dress up as storm troopers and make exploding 3d pie charts.

Just kidding. Let’s just make a cool visualization in Power BI instead.

Star Wars Infographic – Made in Power BI

Here is my visualization embedded below. You can also see it online here. You can switch between Dark Side and Light Side.

How is it made?

I wanted to create something cool and easy for this star wars day. But getting organized data about the movies is rather tricky. Thankfully Power Query can process a hodge-podge of web data in less than 12 parsecs. As the file is clumsy under the hood, I am not sharing it yet. But here is the process.

Gathering the data

• Started with Wikipedia pages on star wars.
• After cleaning the data, I ended up with a table that has film name, date of release, revenue, ratings, director, writer details in it.
• Then I created individual movie page links and navigated them to find out the poster URL (this is the first IMG tag on the page after the TABLE tag with class=”infobox vevent”)
• I did the same for writers to get their mug shots from wikipedia
• Finally, I copied some star wars trivia from mentalfloss and loaded this as a 50 row table

Setting up the visuals

• Initially I wanted to create the visual as a computer console in death star or millennium falcon. But quick google search proved that there are few images of this and most of them are non-rectangular. That would waste too much space on screen.
• I then though of making two layouts – dark side and light side. So I downloaded some wall papers along both lines and started by creating dark side first.
• I set up a slicer on movie poster to enable selection of a film.
• For the film, I wanted to show details along these lines:
  • Box office performance: how much money it made, what rank it had on all time world wide box office and budget
  • Reception: ratings from rotten tomatoes and meta critic
  • Writers: Their faces and names
  • Trivia: Not directly related to the film, but a random trivia that would change everytime you interact with the report.
• I set the dark side page background to my dark side wall paper.
• I added a few images to identify the sections of the infographic.
• I duplicated this page, changed the background and visual formatting.
• Finally I added navigation buttons to the other side on each page (using bookmarks, of course)

Quick demo of the Power BI Viz

In case you could not see the embed above, here is a quick demo. (See it on YouTube)

That is all for now. See you later. I have been way too long in front of computer now. Gotta go.