COVID-19 Dashboard with Power BI

Power BI is Microsoft’s attempt to create a data visualization/business intelligence tool. According to Wikipedia, it was designed in 2010 and became generally available in July 2015. Currently, there is a free version of Power BI called Power BI Desktop that can be downloaded from Microsoft.

In this article, I am going to demonstrate Power BI by creating a COVID-19 dashboard.

You can read on or watch the video below. (It is my first such video, so go easy on me. One of the reasons for creating it was for testing some tools. It is another story that I will write about sometime.)

We will use COVID-19 data that are available from Johns Hopkins University (JHU). Power BI can read data from many sources flat files, excel, XML, JSON, PDF, various databases, etc. The data we are going to use are in csv files in a tabular form. Unfortunately, JHU adds every day a new column to each table with the latest update. While I am certain that there is a way for Power BI to deal with this, I am going to use an R script to fetch the data and transform them into a more convenient form.