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.
12 Responses to “29 Excel Formula Tips for all Occasions [and proof that PHD readers truly rock]”
Some great contributions here.
Gotta love the Friday 13th formula 😀
Great tips from you all! Thanks a lot for sharing! bsamson, particularly you helped me on a terribly annoying task. 🙂
(BTW, Chandoo, it's not exactly "Find if a range is normally distributed" what my suggestion does. It checks if two proportions are statistically different. I probably gave you a bad explanation on twitter, but it'd be probably better if you fix it here... 🙂 )
Great compilation Chandoo
For the "Clean your text before you lookup"
=VLOOKUP(CLEAN(TRIM(E20)),F5:G18,2,0)
I would like to share a method to convert a number-stored-as-text before you lookup:
=VLOOKUP(E20+0,F5:G18,2,0)
@Peder, yeah, I loved that formula
@Aires: Sorry, I misunderstood your formula. Corrected the heading now.
@John.. that is a cool tip.
Hey Chandoo,
That p-value formula is really great for a statistics person like me.
What a p-value essentially is, is the probability that the results obtained from a statistical test aren't valid. So for example, if my p value is .05, there's a 5% probability that my results are wrong.
You can play with this if you install the Data Analysis Toolpak (which will perform some statistical tests for you AND provide the P Value.)
Let's say for example I've got two weeks of data (separated into columns) with the number of hours worked per day. I want to find out if the total number of hours I worked in week two were really all the different than week one.
Week1 Week2
10 11
12 9
9 10
7 8
5 8
Go to Data > Data Analysis > T-Test Assuming Unequal Variances > OK
In the Variable 1 Box, select the range of data for week 1.
In the Variable 2 Box, select the range of data for week 2.
Check "Labels"
In the Alpha box, select a value (in percentage terms) for how tolerant you are of error.
.05 is the general standard; that is to say I am willing to accept a 95% level of confidence that my result is accuarate.
Select a range output.
Excel calculates a number of results: Average (mean) for each week's data, etc.
You'll notice however that there are two P Values; one-tail and two-tail. (one tail tests are for > or .05), the number of hours I worked in week two is statistically equivalent to the number of hours I worked in week one.
So here’s a way you might want to use this. You put up a new entry on your blog. You think it’s the best entry ever! So you pull your webstats for this week and compare it to last week. You gather data for each week on the length of time a visitor spends on your website. The question you’re trying to prove statistically is whether there’s an average increase in the amount of time spent on your website this week as compared to last week (as a result of your fancy new blog post). You can run the same statistical test I illustrated above to find out. Incidentally, it matters very little to the stat test whether the quantity of visitors differs or not.
Anyhow, the Data Analysis toolpack doesn't perform a lot of stat tests that folks like me would like to have access to. In those cases I have to either use different software, or write some very complicated mathematical formulas. Having this p-value formula makes my life a LOT easier!
Thanks!
Eric~
Fantastic stuf..One line explanation is cool.
Thanks to all the contributors
OS
Take FirstName, MI, LastName in access (you can fix it to work in excel) capitalize first letter of each and lowercase the rest and add ". " if MI exists then same for last name:
Full Name: Format(Left([FirstName],1),">") & Format(Right([FirstName]),Len([FirstName])-1),"") & ". ","") & Format(Left([LastName],1),">") & Format(Right([LastName],Len([LastName])-1),"<")
I teach excel, access, etc etc for a living and i have my access students build this formula one step at a time from the inside out to show how formulas can be made even if it looks complicated. Yes I know I could just do IsNull([MI]) and reverse the order in the Iif() function but the point here is to nest as many functions as possible one by one (also I illustrate how it will fail without the Not() as it is)
Extract the month from a date
The easiest formula for this is =MONTH(a1)
It will return a 1 for January, 2 for February etc.
if in a column we write the value of total person for eg. 10 if we spent 1.33 paise each person then how we get total amount in next column and the result will in round form plzzzzz solve my problem sir................... thank u
@Anjali
If the value 10 is in B2 and 1.33 paise is in C2 the formula in D2 could be =B2*C2
If the values are a column of values you can copy the formula down by copy/paste or drag the small black handle at the bottom right corner of cell D2
kindly share with me new forumulas.
How to convert a figure like 870.70 into 870 but 871.70 into 880 using excel formula ? Please help.