Day 2 Dashboard Week - Building University Dataset Mockaroo and Build KPI Dashboard in PowerBI

by Sophie Higson

Scope: MUST include
Time series
At least 3 dimensions; e.g., products, suppliers, etc.
Geographical data
At least 4 measures; e.g., sales, profit, targets, etc.
Demographic data about customers (so there must be customers in the data set)
Anything else they wish to include in their dataset.

Plan my Dataset

Dataset showing applications to the university of Portsmouth (where I went to University).

Plan of Dimensions, Measures, Timescale, & Geographical Data
Plan of dashboard layout

Build in Mockaroo

Each dimension, measure, time, and geographical field was created in Mockaroo. Some fields had random distributions and others were skewed with a custom distribution. All fields were created either using a regular expression, custom list, normal distribution, datetime, or row number. The second date filed needed to come after the first date field for this dataset to make sense.

I also wanted to create spatial points for the postcodes of student accommodation buildings. To do this I used an alteryx workflow using a Mapbox API. The first workflow used the API to retrieve the longitude and latitude of the post codes of student accommodations.

Workflow retrieving coordinates for post codes.

The second workflow connected the coordinate data to the Mockaroo data. It did this using two find and replace tools, where the post code in the Mockaroo data was replaced with both the longitude and latitude for that given post code.

Second workflow to connect the coordinate and mockaroo data.

The output of this workflow was the completed dataset that I used to create my Power BI dashboard.

Building the Dashboard

I unfortunately gave myself less time than I wanted to build the dashboard as creating the data took longer than expected. I chose a simple design with bar charts to show the data.

Unfortunately the both the longitude, latitude and the post code data was not recognized in PowerBI and therefore I could not use to show this information in a map.

Final Dashboard