The US just celebrated Halloween where costumed children walk door-to-door collecting candy from strangers, or perhaps from familiar neighbors. My kids always went to the rich neighborhood where they had the best candy and safest streets. What factors this year contributed to ideal areas for trick-or-treating? Candy sales, low crime rates, household income, walking distances? Sounds like a Big Data challenge! Take a look at this interesting presentation created using Power Map for Excel 2013:
It was quite easy to save a Power Map tour as a video for presentation. The previous video was touched up a little with the music and the Microsoft banners. I downloaded the workbook file and saved a this new video without the music and marketing banners:
The following is from the Power BI blog site:
This Halloween, we decided to visualize the best places in the U.S. to go trick or treating. What city do you think will win? Watch to find out, and then try the upcoming 3D visualization and storytelling capability for self-service business intelligence with Power Map Preview for Excel. The interactive tours you create in Power Map can now be exported to video and shared broadly (like here on YouTube!).
So how did we do this? We knew we had some great datasets available to us both within Power Query for Excel “Online Search” and other online datasets we could bring into Excel using Power Query “From Web”: Candy Spending, Home Value, Household Income, Walkability, and Crime. Together, these datasets were mapped and analyzed geospatially on the 3D Bing map in Power Map. Then we added a few cinematic elements (zooms, pans, etc), some 2D charts for comparison, and annotations, including pictures to call out insights, and…Boo(m)! With the new Create Video feature in Power Map, we exported our creation, added some spooky music, and then quickly and easily shared it with all of you on YouTube — just in time for Halloween. Hopefully, you find it informative in your hauntings tonight!
As a special Halloween treat, we’ve provided the dataset used in this demo below. Best wishes from the Power BI team for a safe and bountiful trick or treat outing!
For more information on Power BI for Office 365, follow these next steps:
- Install Power Map Preview for Excel today.
- Install Power Query Preview for Excel today.
- Sign up for Power BI Preview.
- Access Power BI and Power Map Getting Started and Samples
- Access Power Query Documentation and samples.
- Follow the Power BI Getting Started guide.
- Join in on the conversation on Twitter by following us @MicrosoftBI and @Office using hashtags #PowerBI and #PowerMap, and like us on Facebook at Microsoft BI and Office
- Once you are a “Power BI Pro” enter our Demo Contest for a chance to win an Xbox One, Surface Pro 2 and a trip to the 2014 PASS Business Analytics Conference!
You can download this workbook and play it yourself:
