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Dashboard Week: Thursday- Crosswords in Power BI

This post was originally published on The Data School blog between 2018 and July 2025, before our program was renamed to MIP’s Analytics Career Accelerator. References throughout this article to “The Data School” or “DS” all refer to what is now MIP’s Analytics Career Accelerator. The program, its people, and its commitment to launching outstanding analytics careers remain the same – just under a new name.

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Today’s challenge was to use crossword puzzle data from as early as the 1940s to create a dashboard in Power BI.

Today’s challenge started off a little slow. Initially interpreting the data and finding an interesting narrative was difficult. But once I got into it, it all started coming together. I decided to group the data into decades and analyse how the answers in the puzzles were reflective of the time period.

The second section explored how the artists have a tendency to use the same word across different puzzles they’ve published before. And how they also tend to use similar words regardless of which decades they’re from.

The last section explores how letter distribution of the alphabet in the English language, differs slightly from the distribution within crossword puzzles. It also details why this is likely happening. I had to web scrape the data for the English language letter distribution using Alteryx and was the only supplementary data used in this dashboard.

This ended I’m being a very late finish. I became obsessed with this data and creating an aesthetically pleasing dashboard with good interactivity and insights. I’m very happy with how this dashboard turned out and I look forward to finishing out the week tomorrow.

If you want to view the dashboard close up, it can be found here

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