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Star Wars Character Profiles

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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Using the Star Wars API, I set out to create a Character Profiles Dashboard exploring a wide range of information about all our favourite characters.

My task in the team was to get all of the information relating to the films and the starships. This Alteryx workflow below shows how I joined the data using the API.

Next was to take all of this data into Tableau to start creating the character profiles!

From the viz users are able to select their favourite character and find information about:

  • Home Planet
  • Which films they were in
  • Profile Info
  • Whether they appeared in the Original Trilogy or the Prequel Trilogy…or both (looking at you Obi-Wan you all-rounder)
  • Their favourite vehicles
  • And Starfighters piloted

For me, I grew up with the prequels so my favourite character is Anakin Skywalker. I thought Anakin was so cool, I even had the rats tail haircut because of him way back in grade 2 of primary school.

When selecting Anakin, we can see that his home world is that of Tatooine; a dry desert planet where he was born in 41.9BBY (which is the same year Darth Vader was born…that’s a little sus…). He appeared in 3 films; The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and my personal favourite Revenge of the Sith, which all belong to the prequel trilogy. His favourite vehicles were the Zephyr-G Swoop Bike and the XJ-6 Airspeeder. He was also quite the pilot showing incredible skills flying around in the N-1 Starfighter.

If maybe you don’t have a favourite Star Wars character (SERIOUSLY??!!), users can also just look at the dashboard as a whole, viewing the combination of information about the characters shown at the top. Or if planets are your thing, selecting any of the planets will filter the rest of the charts giving you in depth information on that planet.

This was a fun task and I look forward to using this API more in the future, and always remember…

…Han shot first

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