Creating dashboards

This part of the investigation has been the most time-consuming to undertake. As a starting point, I needed to consider the best data presentation formats carefully. I also felt it would be a good idea to consider the design of my report to ensure I had a clear vision of what I would be creating.

I felt several options of charts would work well for my visualisations of the main areas I was investigating.

Bar Charts

I could use horizontal or vertical bar charts to compare average earnings between genders. Differentiate bars by colour to clearly distinguish male and female salaries.

Line Charts

I could utilise line charts to show trends in the gender pay gap over time. Plot the average salaries for men and women on the y-axis and periods on the x-axis.

Pie charts

I could incorporate pie charts to represent the distribution of earnings between men and women in different categories. Each slice represents the proportion of total earnings for each gender, allowing for a quick visual comparison.

I also considered several aspects of enhancing the visualisations themselves:

Colour and Contrast

I could use colour strategically to draw attention to disparities. This might include using contrasting colours, such as blue and pink, to represent male and female salaries.

Labels

I knew it would be essential to include labels to provide context and explanations for the visual elements. This included adding titles, axis, and data labels to ensure clarity.

Interactive Features

I wanted to make the most of Power BI’s interactive features to allow users to explore the data. Therefore I enhanced my visuals by incorporating slicers and filters to enable users to select specific variables or periods for deeper analysis.

Compiling onto website

At the planning stage, I knew a few plugins were available to add my report to my website. I was keen to experiment with this and assumed the process would be straightforward. Once I began using the plugins to output my information, I realised this was outside my existing skillset. To use the plugins, I would need to use Azure Active Directory.

My user account for both work and study with Edinburgh College did not give me the permission required (as would be expected), so I instead utilised the Microsoft account of my own business. This allowed me to create an app in Azure which could be used with the plugins to connect my website to my Power BI account. Further, using my own account has allowed me to use the tenant settings of Power BI to customise the output to my website.

It took 5 and a half hours to establish how to use Azure, create the correct user permissions, app and connect the prerequisites for the plugins. This was much more time than I had anticipated for adding my report to my website which has set my planned progress back.