It’s time to spring forward for most of us in the US (not forgetting about you in Arizona and Hawaii), but what about the rest of the world? Well I compiled some data from Time and Date and put together a quick Power BI dashboard on my lunch break…ok a lunch break and a coffee break….ok 2 coffee breaks.
Turns out this little exercise was pretty interesting. Some places change times on Fridays and Saturdays and most places in the southern hemisphere don’t change at all, at least not in March and April. Geopolitics aside, Jordan, Syria, Israel, Lebanon, and Palestine are all within miles of each other but most of them change on different days.
The way the Bing map control selects regions based on text values is intriguing. Just about every state in the US and province in Canada can be mapped by it’s full name (Vermont, Colorado, Ontario, Alberta, etc) except for New York and Quebec. I guess because there is a New York and New York City as well as a Quebec and Quebec City the control doesn’t want to make assumptions and doesn’t select anything. I had to mark these as NY and QC in my dataset in order for their regions to fill correctly.
The Filled Map control doesn’t do as well with the Mexican state names, but this could be due to a regional setting in the application. I didn’t think I would spend part of my coffee break looking up ISO 3166 codes. Hmmm that might be the subject of another blog post.
So check out this little map I put together. It has not been optimized in the least and pretty much uses all of the default styling, but I still think it gets the point across better than a static image and a chart. Hooray Beer….I mean, Hooray Interactive Data!
