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The Pokies or the Punt? Day 2 of Dashboard Week

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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For day 2 of dashboard week, we were given a large excel sheet of official Government data from the Australian Gambling Statistics. We then had to choose between either data tables that contained a breakdown of the different gambling products by state, or a breakdown of the states by different gambling products.

I chose to focus on two particular gambling products, gaming machines and wagering (pokie machines and punting on sports games), and gathered two additional sheets of data to determine the exact population amount recorded for each state, each year. Below is what my Alteryx workflow ended up looking like.

While she was a bit of a mess, she managed to get the job done, and I got relatively clean Australian gambling data for the years 1996-2021. I then used Power BI to create a dashboard that showcased the two forms of gambling in a bit of a head-to-head comparison. Below is what the different sections of my dashboard looked like.

On the front overview page, you can see some statistics over time for each state (the four black rectangles change what measures are shown on the line charts). When you right click on a point on the line chart, you can drill down to see the state and year and how particular statistics looked for them at that point in time, such as real turnover, real expenditure, and real government revenue.

Back to the front page, if you click on the top right black button, it takes you to a state-by-state comparison per product and per year for each of the statistics in the first drill down, as well as profit earned per capita. Right clicking on one of these bars will take you to a second drill down page that looks at a direct product head-to-head comparison for the state chosen and whichever year is selected in the slicer.

 

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