Fueling the Future

The purpose of this assignment was to get familiar with creating dashboards that give insights and tell a story as part of my Advanced BI class. We conducted a couple of class exercises to help us understand how to layout dashboard ideas and prepared dashboards. For this project, I chose to work with and expand on the CPI exercise we did in class using CPI data from StatsCanada website. The data was downloaded as a .csv file and cleaned within PowerBI after loading it.

I was curious to see the trends in inflation since 2017 as that is the year I moved to Canada. I decided to analyze the cost of living in Canada through a dashboard which focuses on basic necessities for an affordable and comfortable life. Biggest challenge was trying to synthesize what I wanted to communicate and looking for appropriate supporting open source datasets to derive conclusions.

This is an educational dashboard meant to help a fresh graduate, ages 21 to 29, set realistic financial goals and budget as they navigate the cost of living. It also highlights important societal biases and economical policies of our country. I was going for a clean, consistent and user friendly design, balancing depth yet simplicity making it easy for anybody to understand it.

This dashboard can have more depth added to it by filtering urban/rural data, provincial data, living situation, etc. I would be interested in also using CPI basket weight data to further analyze what percent of cost of living is allocated to gasoline and alcohol as that just amazed me on how one being a necessity vs. the other being a commodity has different, but against the common sense, impact on their inflation. It also has the ability to expand globally by adding data from other countries. Potentially adding in qualitative factors for living standard one can use that dashboard as a tool to decide their next move globally. Once I had a visual of how I wanted to proceed with my data analysis, I decided to load the data and clean it within PowerBI.

While students at my university, OntarioTech, can derive a few conclusions and if expanded further it can be useful to policy makers as it would prompt the users to further analyze the geo-politics, economic policies and social structure as the major factors affecting necessities like Gasoline! As the trends show a huge plunge in the inflation for gasoline during covid and post-covid period, one can safely assume and credit it to global affairs and imports Canada and its provinces rely on. Lastly, the upward trend on gasoline, which also affects transportation and energy, warns the students and fresh graduates to plan their finances keeping that in mind.