2023 Week 04 | Power BI: Mortgage Rates Area Chart

Introduction

Hello everyone! I’m excited to have my first challenge of 2023 up and ready for your enjoyment. Last year I got a reputation as providing challenges that were, let’s say….a little on the easier side, so this year I’m just going to own it! 

I was scrolling Twitter in hopes of finding some inspiration for this week’s challenge when I stumbled upon this tweet. This viz created by Yasushi Ishikawa as part of the Tableau Back 2 Viz Basics challenge, shows the history of 15 and 30 year mortgage rates in an area chart. 

Check out the visuals that you’ll be recreating below!

Requirements

  1. Obtain the Mortgage Rates.csv dataset from Data.World
  2. Create an area chart that shows both the 15 and 30 year rate on a single axis
  3. Format the colors to be approximately the same colors as in the example report
  4. Create a custom column that takes the difference between the 15 and 30 year rate fields either in Power Query or using DAX
  5. Create a chart that shows the different between the 15 and 30 year rate on the first day of each month in the data set. One approach is to use the StartofMonth DAX function to get the calculate column for your y axis. 
  6. Format text and titles appropriately
 

Dataset

The dataset this week can be viewed here: https://data.world/back2vizbasics/2023week-1-build-an-area-chart

Share

After you finish your workout, share on Twitter using the hashtags #WOW2023 and #PowerBI, and tag @JSBaucke@MMarie, @shan_gsd, @KerryKolosko@NerdyWithData. Also make sure to fill out the Submission Tracker so that we can count you as a participant this week in order to track our participation throughout the year.

Solution

8 thoughts on “2023 Week 04 | Power BI: Mortgage Rates Area Chart”

  1. Nice and quick Workout Wednesday. Question, any reason the top graph is showing Year but the second, Date?

  2. Question on the requirements section, item 5:
    Why the task on the first day of each month? I see that the data is weekly. It’s a question out of curiosity, to learn if there is any business-centric purpose to this? If not, it is to just group the calculation(s) monthly? Thanks the attention.

  3. Hey! Thanks for the comments. The reason that I have day at the top is because that is the most granular level of data. The bottom I wanted to show just a monthly tracker that took the first week of the month available in the data because an aggregated monthly KPI wouldn’t make sense given the data.

    This also provides users a challenge of showing the chart just at the first week level. Thanks for participating both of you!

  4. I am new to this challenge. Can anyone let me know how to post my report to let others have access to review it?

    1. Hi James! Thanks for joining us! If you have a Power BI license (even the free tier), you can publish the report to the web and share the link on your social media! If you are working on Power BI desktop only, you can take a screenshot and share that! Keep track of all your reports so you can build your own Power BI portfolio!

Comments are closed.

Scroll to Top