Yesterday we worked through rebuilding a Tableau dashboard in Tableau Next.
For day two of Dashboard Week, Coach Valerija challenged us to rebuild a Makeover Monday project of our choosing using Power BI- another tool that’s completely new to us!
I chose to rebuild Makeover Monday 2025 Week 5.
For any readers who aren’t familiar with the project, Makeover Monday (MOM, moving forward) is a Tableau community project run by Andy Kriebel and Eva Murray. In it,every Monday they provide an existing visualization and data set and participants are challenged to create better, more effective visualizations to help make information more accessible. During training, we completed several MOMs, each with only an hour to familiarize ourselves with the data and build a visualization.
MOM 2025 Week 5 used data from the World Happiness Report.
Here’s the original visualization I built in Tableau. “Selected Country” is a parameter that highlights the country in each of those metrics.
You can check out the interactivity of this viz on my Tableau Public.
Coach Valerija kindly let us know that we’d be working with Power BI after our presentations on Day 1 of Dashboard Week, which saved us a bit of time- we were able to download the program and explore some before leaving for the day.
Starting off, I knew I wanted to spend a while understanding the basics of Power BI, as well as figuring out some key points that would make the transition to a new tool as quick and painless as possible, so I watched a couple of introductory videos, like this one.
I think even after watching that, I could tell that it was going to be tricky, but I didn’t realize how tricky.
Thinking about it now, I’ll make the comparison of learning a new language that’s related to one you already know. I knew what I was trying to do, but had no clue what the terms were or how to actually make things happen and even the resources I utilized felt way beyond my understanding in many instances. What is DAX? Why do they talk about it so much? What’s a slicer? What’s a helper table? How do I build one? Why can’t I reference a dynamic field in a text table? Is the thing I’m trying to do possible in this tool or not? I put google to work today, that’s for sure!
I decided to stick with the dot strip plots for the rebuild, which was in fact, quite quick and painless for the basic charts, and then worked through this very helpful tutorial to build the selector. It was around the time that I was struggling to build the helper table that I realized that it’s likely that most people who are trying to build fancy interactivity like this in Power BI have probably spent more than two hours in the tool before, so they don’t need guidance on things like where to create a measure, or how to reference fields in DAX (<3 forever the ability to drag and drop fields into calculations!).
After building all the charts and the interactivity, it was time to work on the visual aspect. I was happy enough with the colors, but wanted the selected countries to stand out more. Turns out, there’s no move marks to front option, so I ended up creating a size calc to make the selected country bigger.
It still isn’t ideal, so if I find myself bored with nothing to do sometime in the future, I might explore the slightly hacky way of making it look like the selected country is in front. That approach involves duplicating each of those charts, filtering one copy to only include the selected country and the other to exclude the selected country, then adjusting transparency to make sure both are visible.
Overall, I actually like the layout of this dashboard better — but not being able to bring the selected country to the front is a bit disappointing. The tooltips also need some work. From what I understand, building completely custom ones (that don’t include automatic fields like the size calculation) requires setting up individual pages as tooltips, which wasn’t going to happen today.
Like yesterday’s trial by fire with Tableau Next, I can recognize the value of Power BI and think that with some more time dedicated to learning, I could come to appreciate its different strengths over Tableau. For today though, the fact that I can’t easily adjust tooltips, build a dual axis dot strip plot, or even bring marks to the front are all reasons I’ll be sticking with Tableau as my go-to data visualization tool.