At the beginning of the year I set a goal to learn something new. I’ve always loved business intelligence and bringing data to life in the form of dashboards and charts so for the 1st half of the year I wanted to focus on Microsoft’s Power BI. I’m not going to explain what Power BI is, but if you want to read up on it go here: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/
This post is just going to show off my dashboard. ? See live example above.
I’m a huge sports fan and the best time of the year happens to fall in March. Besides my birthday being in March, it’s also March Madness. Hours and hours of basketball. I could of used AdventureWorks for my dataset, but I wanted to use something I’m interested in. I found some data containing every NCAA tournament game result since 1985 (when the tournament was expanded to the 64 team bracket). The dataset contains the year, round (1-6), seed of the teams (1-16), region (1-4) and the scores. Perfect. Let’s use this to create a dashboard.
There’s not a ton of data, but I used what I could and tried to answer some questions around wins and upsets. Here’s a screenshot of the final product:
You can see Wins By Team (Duke with 93, North Carolina with 78, etc), Wins by Seed, National Championships, and Upsets vs Wins by Year. You can also see that a total of 2142 games have been played with 199 different teams in the tournament.
This was really fun and answers a lot of the questions I was thinking in my head while designing. The top left corner also has slicers which help filter the data. For example, if I wanted to see only the data for 2015 I could change the Year slicer to 2015 and it would update all my visualizations:
You can see that Duke won the National Championship from the National Championships visualization. If you hover over the Wins and Upsets visualization, you’ll see there were 30 upsets out of 63 games.
Let’s say I want to view data for a certain Team. Let’s choose Alabama Crimson Tide. If I change the Team slicer to Alabama I can see some data based around this team.
Alabama has won 19 NCAA tournament games, 0 national championships, has been a 5 or 7 seed 21% of the time and they’ve had a few upsets along the way. Not bad for a football school.
What about data for the National Championship game? I can change the Round slicer to 6, which is the National Championship round and view the data this way.
I can see out of 34 games, there has only been 16 different teams make the National Championship. Duke leads the way with 6, followed by North Carolina and Connecticut with 4. The 1 seed has played in this game 59% of the time, and there were upsets in 1988, 1990, 1997, 2003, 2006, and 2016.
We can also click on the visualizations themselves to view data. For example, if we reset our slicers to show all data and click on the #1 seed in the Wins By Seed Donut Chart we see the following:
We can see that the #1 seed has played in 419 games with a total of 41 different teams. Duke has won 51 games as the #1 seed while North Carolina has won 46. Duke has also won the National Championship 4 times as the #1 seed and in 1999 the #1 seed won 17 games which is the highest.
Really cool stuff. I loved working on this project and working with this data.