Nicole L. Savitsky

I was recently inspired by Samantha Rodger’s “My Year in Books 2022” project (please check out Samantha’s work!) that featured personal book reading data. Once I saw this awesome dashboard, I knew I wanted to take a look at my own book reading data. So I headed over to my GoodReads’ account and exported my data into a CSV file and got to work!

I actually have two GoodReads accounts, so I ended up downloading data from both accounts and then merging them into one CSV / Excel file.
From there I ended up cleaning up the CSV file. I deleted columns of content I didn’t need. I used IF statements to fill-in data based on if I marked the book as ‘book-i-own, ebook-i-own, or library-book.’ While this was a great way for me to practice some of my IF function skills, I didn’t reliably mark in GoodReads every book with if I owned it or borrowed it so I didn’t end up adding this data to my spreadsheet as I didn’t think it would be accurate.

After cleaning up my excel files, I imported them into Microsoft Power BI Desktop. I transformed the data to make sure each column had the correct data type and then also include three more date data type columns at the end so that I could showcase how many books I read by year, month and day of the week.

Next, I began building my dashboard. I recently came across a dashboard that had KPIs on the side and I really liked that visual, so I decided to play with that a bit. Then, I tried to remember everything I learned about which visuals for which type of data you’re trying to show. I also thought a lot about how you place your visuals in order to tell a story — the more important stuff at the top and from right to left. I chose to utilize KPI cards, bar charts, column charts, pie charts and a table listing out book titles with their rating. I even utilized my favorite feature I learned about in my Power BI course – drill through! I was able to allow anyone to right-click on one of the titles in my table and drill through to the next page which featured all the metadata about the book (author, year published, year read, ISBN, etc.). Lastly, I went with a monochromatic look for colors (my blog brand colors actually) and this ended up being the thing most people gave feedback on to change after I posted my final product to LinkedIn.

So first up is my original dashboard with the original colors:

Now that you’ve seen the original, you can compare it to my updated version which includes darker colors for more contrast, complementary but more distinct colors for my pie charts and then conditionally formatting on certain column charts to show case key metrics. I utilized a few articles I posted about on my LinkedIn here to help me in choosing a color pallet to work with.

Please feel free to continue to give me any additional feedback you have on this dashboard design. I’d love to hear about anything I can do to improve this as well as any reactions or thoughts you have on the project!

Thanks for stopping by!

-Nicole