2024 Week 36 | Power BI: Recreate a NYT Interactive Article

Power BI, Workout Wednesday / By

Introduction

Welcome back to Workout Wednesday. This week we’re taking inspiration from the incredible infographics team over at the New York Times. Their 2015 article looks at the average American’s contribution to the drought in California. As of today (Sep 2024), about a third of California remains abnormally dry.

This challenge features some fun data work in Power Query and of course the design is entirely up to you. I have created a sample for inspiration, but feel free to build your infographic how you see fit. In this challenge you’ll scrape data from the web, use Power Query to parse the images out of the website URL, and use a custom visual (or two). 

Find the website URL and instructions to complete the challenge below, and as always, have fun!

Requirements

  Get and transform data

  1. Get data from the NYT article using the web connector. 
  2. Transform your data
    • Do any data cleaning you need in Power Query
    • I did a lot of messy transformations – I’m sure I could have done this in a much more efficient manner. I challenge you to find the best way!
    • Be sure to get the image URLs out of the HTML
  3. Add visuals to the canvas. Be sure add at least:
    • an informative title
    • main takeaways from the article
    • any custom navigation you’d like to build
  4. Add any other design elements that you’d like
  5. Ensure that all visuals meet the minimum standards of having alt text, that the tab order in your report makes sense, and that your color choices meet the minimum contrast standards.
  6. As always, mix up the design in any way you see fit! This should be fun!

Dataset

This week you’ll scrape data from the NYT article to build your report. Be sure to credit the original article in your viz.

Share

After you finish your workout, share on Twitter or LinkedIn using the hashtags #WOW2024 and #PowerBI, and tag @MMarie, @shan_gsd, @KerryKolosko. 

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

Solution File available for download from the data stories gallery.

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