Forum Discussion
College Class Schedule Analysis
I'm working on trying to solve the same problem in Power BI. Were you ever able to find a solution?
kw127533,
I ended up breaking each day into timeblocks of minutes (1,440 min/day) and then performing a simple comparison of course start time/end time against each timeblock. This worked for me and I was able to visualize course schedule density by various units of time (i.e. day, week, month, term, year, etc.). So many of our courses start and end at odd times rather than on the hour so I couldn't think of another way to tackle this challenge other than moving to smaller time units.
I've been sidetracked on other projects but when I get back to it, I want to bring in course geolocation data and overlay that on our campus map to analyse traffic flows and space utilization.
Hope that helps.
Yeah, I was considering that approach as well but by the quarter or half hour. How did you manage creating the timeblocks? Did you create a column for each minute or use something like R to automate this?
kw127533,
I created a lookup table with 1,440 rows for the minutes througout the day and then used DAX to evaluate if the minute of time fell between class start/stop time. This gave me bands of rows that could be used for density plots. Don't recall all the details as I've been busy with other projects but hope to get back to it again soon.
I am absolutely sure there is a much more elegant way to do this that uses pure DAX without a lookup table but this is the approach I used to quickly solve the problem. The calendar feature of Power BI may also facilitate this kind of analysis but I"ve not had time to explore. I'm also sure others in this forum has solved similar problems but during my search, I wasn't able to find the solution I was after.
Good luck!
Well that's definitely a better solution than what I had in mind and anything I found in the forums. Thanks for the information! I'll keep you posted as to how my analysis goes.