Commonwealth games 2018 have ended in the weekend. Let’s take a look at the games data thru Power BI to understand how various countries performed.
Here is my viz online (or you can see a snapshot below, click on it to expand).
Looks good, isn’t it? Well, read on to know how it is put together.
This is a high-level tutorial, aimed at Power BI users than newbies. If you are new to Power BI, start with my Power BI beginners tutorial.
Commonwealth Games Performance – Power BI Visualization – Tutorial
Step 1: Define goals for your visualization
Whenever you are making anything more than a bar chart (come to think of it, even bar charts need a bit of noodling before hand), it is prudent to spend time thinking what you want to accomplish with the visual.
For me the goals are:
- Understand how various countries have performed in 2018, compare that to previous editions of games (say 2014, 2010 and 2006)
- See which countries have improved their medal performance from last games
- Understand how top 10 countries performed – which events they excel in
- Prepare everything in less than 2 hours
I made a rough sketch of the visualization too. But I deviated quickly once I started playing with the data in Power BI.
Step 2: Gather the data
The data for this visualization came from 2 sources:
- gc2018.com for 2018 games data
- https://results.gc2018.com/en/all-sports/medal-standings.htm
- https://results.gc2018.com/en/all-sports/medallist-by-sport-<country name>.htm
- thecgf.com for previous games data
- https://thecgf.com/results/games/3052 for 2014
- https://thecgf.com/results/games/3046 for 2010
- https://thecgf.com/results/games/3026 for 2006 medals
I mashed up most of the data in Power Query, but had to use a bit of Python (more on this in a future blog post) as the medalist by sport page (https://results.gc2018.com/en/all-sports/medallist-by-sport-<country name>.htm) has weird formatting with event name as A tag followed by medalists in a table and this was too much to process in PQ.
Step 3: Set up the data model
After gathering all the data in PQ, we can bring only relevant tables to Power BI model. I brought below tables:
- medals – with medal tables for current (2018) and previous three editions of CG games
- top 10 countries – event level medal data for top 10 countries in 2018
- Countries – generated table with top 10 country names and their 3 letter abbreviations
- medal types – typed in table with URLs for medal images and custom sort order of Gold, Silver and Bronze
Step 4: Create measures
Since one of the goals for this visual is to keep everything under 2 hours, I created only basic measures.
Medal Count = sum(medals[Medals])Medal Count for 2014 = CALCULATE([Medal Count], 'medals'[Games] IN { "2014" })Medal Count for 2018 = CALCULATE([Medal Count], 'medals'[Games] IN { "2018" })Medal Count (all) = CALCULATE([Medal Count], all(medals[Games]))Country Name = SELECTEDVALUE(medals[Country]) for showing in tooltip & chart header% increase - 2014 to 2018 = DIVIDE([Medal Count for 2018]-[Medal Count for 2014], [Medal Count for 2014], 0) for showing in tooltipmedal count - top 10 = countrows('top 10 countries')total medal count for country = CALCULATE([medal count - top 10], all('top 10 countries'[Event]))medal % = [medal count - top 10] / [total medal count for country]
As you can see, these are basic arithmetic or simple CALCULATE measures. I used the excellent quick measure feature to create the Medal Count for 2014 measure and learned about IN keyword. #awesome
Step 5: Create visuals
Visual for exploring medal performance by country
I started with a simple slicer on games year and a matrix visual by country in rows, medal type in columns and medal count in values. Then I added data bars to the medal count.
Visual for exploring change over time:
Then I added Ribbon chart with Games, Medal Type and Medal Count to see how total medals have changed over time. When you pick a country from the matrix, this visual updates to show how that country’s performance changed over time.
Visual for seeing which countries improved in 2018:
I added a scatter chart with Country as legend, Medal count for 2018 as X and Medal count for 2014 as Y. Then I added symmetry shading to this chart from analytics pane. Viola, we can see which countries did well or worse in this round compared to 2014.
Visual for tool tip
I inserted a new page (called Country Medals), changed the format to Tooltip and added a few visuals to make it a tool tip for the scatter chart.
Setting up tooltips is still painful, but this is a new feature, so I am sure MS will add more teeth to this power.
Linking scatter chart and tooltip
Select the scatter chart and from Format pane, set up tooltip to a report page and select Country Medals page.
Visual for seeing where top 10 countries excel
I added another matrix visual with Event in rows, abbreviated country name in columns and medal % in values. Then I added conditional formatting > Background color scales to spot bigger numbers easily.
This visual and the scatter plot are then linked to a slicer on medal type (Gold / Silver / Bronze) so you can see event performance and change over time for any type of medal.
Formatting the visuals
The default colors for visuals use Power BI color scheme. I changed the colors to match medals – Gold, Silver and Bronze so that they are easy to spot. Unfortunately, this would not sync across all visuals, so we have to format each of the visuals (well, only two – ribbon chart and bar chart on the tooltip page)
Download Commonwealth games Power BI Viz
Click here to download the workbook. Examine the query definitions (especially top 10 countries) to learn some quirky ways to work with Power Query. Enable interactions from view ribbon to see how each visual interacts with others. Play with it and mash up your own data to create something equally awesome. If you end up making another viz from this data, feel free to post it in the comments section so we all can see and learn from you.
Want to learn Power BI? Check out Power BI Play Date
If you like what you have seen and want to learn how to build such cool visualizations and reports for your work, sign up for my Power BI Play Date. We are opening next batch very soon.
24 Responses to “10 Supercool UI Improvements in Excel 2010”
The best improvement by far is the Collapse Ribbon ^ button !
Kind of a shame that some of the best improvements are actually returns to old functionality. One thing I don't like is that to get to recent files I need to do an extra click after File - apart from Save As, that's why I'm usually in the File menu. I like the sparkline options, though they are still as not fully featured as some of the free and pay options out there.
The collapse button for the ribbon menu is good news. Can you make the ribbon menus stick too?
Nine improvements, not ten. You can also select multiple objects in 2007. Click on the Find & Select item at the far right of the Home tab, and the dropdown looks remarkably like your 2010 screenshot.
@Jon.. Thank you. Dumb me, I somehow thought we couldnt select objects in Excel 2007. Just saw the "select menu" and it is there. I have corrected the post and removed the point. I have added the "you can make your own ribbons" instead. Thanks once again.
@Arti: what do you mean by make ribbons stick?
@Alex: May be it is my installation, but when I go to "File menu" I see "recent files" by default.
For example, if I am working with one of the contextual ribbon menus (Pivot tables, Drawing/Chart etc), as soon as I click away from the selected object, the menu tabs vanish. If I click on the object again immediately, then Excel will remember what I was looking at, but if I wander away and click on a Pivot, then back again on the Chart, the menus will 'appear' but not get activated, thereby causing much annoyance and additional clicking.
I want to "pin" the whole menu (not invididual commands) somehow, so that I can have the menu there for the length of the time I am working with graphics. Excel 2003 used to have the Drawing toolbar you could detach and hover while you were working, but this functionality disappeared in Excel 2007.
My thought was Excel should just allow a 'pin', similar to the Recently Opened files menu, for the Ribbon Menus as well. If I have not selected any Drawing object, the commands can be greyed out, but I want the menu as a whole to 'stick'.
@Arti... I think MS solved this problem differently. When I select a pivot and go to "design" tab Excel 2010 remembers this and automatically takes me to "design" tab when I reselect the pivot.
Apart from this you can also define your own ribbon with all the things you normally do. See the above article (I have added this after Jon's comments)
Nice feature. About time for a upgrade for MS Office
Oh... okay. That might be a start. I'd probably just copy-paste the Drawing tab haha. Thanks. I'll definitely give Excel 2010 a try.
Btw - have you considered getting into / gotten into the world of Excel as it meets SharePoint?
Actually, the replacement new thing is probably better than all the rest. One thing that the designers of the Office 2007 ignored was allowing regular users to customize their own interface. Office 2010's interface was expanded in this way to address the huge uproar.
Is there still a limit on how many things you can add to the QAT bar? (I'm too lazy to look myself.)
@Jeff.. it seems to take quite a few, but only shows one line and gives a little arrow button at the end. (summary: shucks!)
The best thing is you can edit the ribbon directly from excel, so now i can create my own bar with just the things I use regularly!
One of the annoying things in 07 for me is the Add-Ins menu bar - in 03 I could keystroke directly to menu add ins.. In 07 I needed an extra keystroke just to activate the add-in menu, then the keystrokes as normal.. Hope this marek sense..
John -
If you remember the old Excel 2003 Alt-key shortcuts, you can still use them in 2007. To get to the Add-In dialog:
Alt-T-I
Dear Arti & Chandoo
Seen your comments over some issues. Hope you are form India, gone through your comment expecting a pin to command it as a whole, great, hope if someone out of MS have read it, it may be kept in mind while the next R & D of Office Ver. 16
Just incase someone forgot CTRL+F1 will collapse the ribbon.
[...] was pleasantly surprised when I ran Microsoft Excel 2010 for first time. It felt smooth, fast, responsive and looked great on my [...]
I like the sparklines, and the ability to modify the charts
How do you get rid of the advertisment on the right hand side? If you upgrade then will it take off the ads?
Once again Microsoft has re-decorated the Office and we are NOT pleased!
The graphics object selector can be found in the Home ribbon under Find & Select, Select Objects near the bottom of the drop down. You can make it part of the Quick Access toolbar by right click over it and selecting Add to Quick Access toolbar.
The graphics "cursor" will now appear on the mini-toolbar at the top left of the window.
How to get rid of "Add-Ins" button in Backstage (File)" menu by means of XML code, i.e. to hide, to delete or to disable this button?
This button is usually situated in the Backstage menu between "Help" and "Options" buttons.
Vladimir, did you ever get an answer to your question?
I am tying to customize the ribbon UI for a file using XML, and this is precisely the piece I can't figure out. I can hide other tabs, remove items from QAT and backstage - all except the options that are showing up under add-ins in backstage. If there is an XML syntax for referencing this thing and making it invisible, I cannot find it.
Hey, nice tutorial. Please check my video tutorial on similar topic at the below link and provide your comments:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeIFc0jYjpA