Power BI Data Visualization World Champs - Round 1 is LIVE

[slindsay]

Post updated: 12 Jan at 5pm Pacific

Power BI Dataviz World Champs - Round 1 of 3

Welcome to Round 1 of this year's Power BI Dataviz World Champs, FabCon Atlanta edition! After much anticipation, the competition begins with a challenge focused on city livability trends, featuring the fictional city of Briarport as the anchor city.

Your mission: turn data into insights that inspire action.

To help you get started, join our kickoff call on January 15 (available in English, Spanish, and Portuguese), where we’ll walk through the challenge theme, starter file, talk through some dataviz and contest best practices, and answer your questions live.

✅ Week 1: 12 January to 19 January

Analyze fictional livability metrics for Briarport and 11 peer cities across five key dimensions:

• Housing Affordability
• Transit Score
• Green Space %
• Emissions Index
• Livability Composite

Use the provided starter semantic model (2015–2024) to uncover trends, compare cities, and tell a compelling story.

📂 Starter Semantic Model

•  Week 1 Starter File (If you are having issues with the link please download from GitHub)
• Note: this file was updated at 5pm Pacific on 12 Jan. If you downloaded the file prior to this time, please download again. The city names have been updated in the latest version of the file - you should be looking at cities: Briarport, Golden Shoals, Southmere, Willowford, Prairiebend, Crestwater, Ironbar, Ashgrove, Cloudbreak, Starfall, Northhaven, Eastwick, Winterstead
  • If you downloaded the file and worked all week on it using the original city names, please submit it! Judges will take special consideration for this - as the confusion was caused by us. 

 

🎯 Audience Profile

Your report should speak to city planners, policy analysts, and community stakeholders who want to:

• Compare Briarport's performance against peer cities.
• Identify strengths and weaknesses in housing, transit, green space, and emissions.
• Use insights to inform urban planning decisions and prioritize investments.

📋 Requirements

• Report size: No more than 5 standard pages (or equivalent if using a custom canvas).
• Visuals: Include at least one core visual (e.g. line chart, bar chart, scatterplot, shape map, etc.).
• Data: Use the provided City Metrics and City Lookup tables. You CAN add additional supporting data.
• Accessibility:
  • Maintain ≥4.5:1 contrast ratio
  • Provide alt text for charts
  • Avoid color-only encodings
  • Ensure logical keyboard navigation order
• Entries are due by 11:59 pm on 19 January
  

📝 How to Submit (read full article for details)

1. Publish your report to the Power BI Contests Gallery.
2. Include “Week 1:” in your post title - example: "Week 1: Housing in Atlanta remains the most affordable"
3. Select the category "World Champs ATL"
4. Add a short description of your approach and visuals.
5. Share the link in the contest thread (below this post).

Read more about submitting a great contest entry in a post from community leader and Microsoft MVP @Sahir_Maharaj!

🏆 Judging Criteria

Your entry will be evaluated on:

• Insightfulness (10 pts) – Does your report surface meaningful trends and comparisons?
• Visual Effectiveness and Clarity (10 pts) – Is the story easy to follow and well-structured?
• Creativity and Innovation (10 pts) – Are your visuals engaging and innovative?
• Accessibility (10 pts) – Does it meet the basic accessibility standards of appropriate color contrast, inclusion of alternative text, and set tab order?
  
  

👩‍⚖️ Judges

Our panel of esteemed judges includes:

• Chris Hamill is a Principal Program Manager at Microsoft and a leading expert in Power BI report design. With nearly a decade of experience in business intelligence and a foundation in corporate finance, Chris specializes in crafting user-centric dashboards that drive clarity and impact.
• Diana Ackermann is a freelance statistician with 15+ years of turning messy data into clear, executive-ready insights. She fell in love with Power BI building forecasting and supply‑chain reporting into a SaaS solution, and she’s been focused on practical, leadership-friendly analytics ever since. Diana judged the 2023 Information Is Beautiful Awards and now contributes to the Workout Wednesday team, all while sharing her expertise widely through conferences, podcasts, and meetups.
• Shannon Lindsay is a Program Manager at Microsoft and an analyst, BI leader, and community builder dedicated to making data visualization in Power BI both engaging and inclusive. Shannon focuses on accessibility judging for Microsoft Fabric Community Contests.

🏆 Prizes

• Finalists: Finalists will be selected each week, along with one wildcard finalist. Each of the 4 finalists will receive a FabCon ATL conference pass and 3 nights hotel accommodation in Atlanta, Georgia.
• Top entries: Top entries from all rounds will also be featured on the Power BI Community Website, giving you an opportunity to showcase your work to a global audience!
• Fan favorites: Entries with the most likes/kudos will also be featured as fan favorites!  

Ready to show your skills?

Join the kickoff call on January 15, download the starter file, and post your entry in the Power BI Community. Let’s make this finale unforgettable!

[Sahir_Maharaj]

super excited to see the amazing solutions!! 🎉

[Rufyda]

Amazing theme and dataset .. can’t wait to dive in and see the community’s creativity!!

[Cam-PBI]

Using fictional data against real locations is a questionable move. Spreading misinformation seems antithetical to the purpose of data visualisation to me.

Why not use a real dataset instead?

[slindsay]

@Cam-PBI - totally valid criticism/feedback, thank you! To avoid data licensing issues we created fictional values, but it's clear that we should have created fictional names, too. I went ahead and updated the starter file to avoid misrepresenting anything. Appreciate the feedback - thanks for making this a better experience for everyone!

[Nabha-Ahmed]

I’m super excited to see the results and can’t wait to see everyone else’s too!

Wishing the best of luck to all!

[KarinSzilagyi]

Hi @slindsay ,

I have a quick question around tab order and accessibility in Power BI when using modal-style elements (e.g. show/hide info boxes triggered by a button). Though I've been looking for a while, I couldn't find any reliable sources on how to handle special cases like this, where the elements are only part of the Z-Order depending on the current view-state. I hope it’s alright that I’m asking here, since it might be relevant for the accessibility-aspect of judging and so others might also see the answer.

Given that tab order in Power BI is static and can’t change based on visibility, I wanted to sanity-check the least-harm / best-practice approach.

Am I correct in assuming that a modal (in this case as grouped visuals that overlay the the other elements on the page ) should be placed high in the tab order, directly after its trigger button and before the main page content, so keyboard users don’t have to tab through the entire page to reach the modal content again when it’s open?

For example:

Option A (modal early in tab order):

Tab-Order:

1. Page navigation
2. Button (Open modal)
3. Info modal (group)
   3.1 Button (Close modal)
   3.2 Modal content
4. Regular page content (continue regular Z-order)

More page content

VS

Option B (modal last in tab order):

Tab-Order:

1. Page navigation
2. Button (Open modal)
3. Other page content
4. More page content
5. Info modal (group)
   5.1 Button (Close modal)
   5.2 Modal content

Most accessibility guides I’ve found for modals are web-development specific and recommend removing the modal from the tab order until it becomes visible - which unfortunately isn’t possible in Power BI. So I’m trying to confirm what’s considered the "most accessible" and recommended pattern within Power BI’s constraints.

Thanks a lot for any guidance!

[Jennifer7711]

I am excited for the contest.  However, I do have a bit of feedback.  I registered for the 'Kick-off' webinar - assuming that this webinar marks the first day of the contest.  I had no idea that Round 1 was already open.  My feedback for the future is that the 'Kick-off' should occur on Day 1.  Also, I have had a lot of trouble getting notifications about these contests.  I have tried updating my settings.  It would be great to add additional emails to our accounts.

[Abhilash_P]

Hi @Jennifer7711 ,
Webinar is live NOW, Not sure if it is usefull though but
https://www.youtube.com/live/giYxNSplWfU

[slindsay]

@Jennifer7711 - thank you for that feedback! We realize this caused confusion and it's noted - we'll ensure kickoffs and official launches are the same moving forward!

As far as notifications, this isn't the most ideal suggestion, but if you follow me (or other community members) over on LinkedIn that's where I do the most promotion about these kinds of contests! We also promote them in banners at the top of the page here in the community, but we know that people don't live in this space. I'll bring this feedback to my colleagues and see what we can do for improved communication!

[slindsay]

@KarinSzilagyi thanks for such a well written and thoughtful question! This goes beyond my knowledge of how to best approach the issue in PBI - I am reaching out to the accessibility team to get you an answer! And - because this question is so great, I'm thinking we might want to do a quick blog post about it once we have some guidance! Thank you!

[Deku]

@slindsay Not a fan of the change to the file. I downloaded at the start and done alot of work that will have to be thrown away with the name changes ☹️ just happened to look at the submissions and notice the weird city names. Do I need to swap to the new names

[KarinSzilagyi]

@slindsay

Thank you, that would be great - I really appreciate you checking with the accessibility team!

While doing some additional accessibility testing, I also noticed something related that might be worth flagging: when using NVDA, I wasn’t able to get any content inside a tooltip page to be read. Regular text tooltips work as expected, but tooltip pages seem to be treated like images and are skipped entirely by the screen reader, including any alt text defined on the tooltip page itself.

I’d be very interested in the accessibility team’s perspective on the intended and recommended use of tooltip pages from an accessibility standpoint, and whether their use has any implications for accessibility evaluation or (in this case) contest scoring.

Thanks again for looking into this. I’m looking forward to hearing what the accessibility team recommends!

[Paruccone]

can you please provide definitions for the metrics? Even if they are random, this is key to understand (and explain/visualize) the data.

How good is good and how bad is bad when considering 10 points of difference for example in Housing and/or 10 in Transit? With the provided data we can tell who's performing better compared to other cities within same "category" but that doesn't necessarily imply "good" without a reference: they may be all peforming badly, some less bad than others. The only exception is the livebility score for which it is clearly stated that it's 0-100 (still we don't know if it's a value that we can use as a recap/overall/average of all others or not: is the livebility supposed to be an overall/averga score derived from the others or an additional one?

Can we assume the lowest existing value within the same category is the worst possible and the highest is the best possible? If not, can you at least provide the lowest and highest values for each category/range?

Thanks!

[de75jo]

Amazing, here's my submission: Week 1: Briarport - Strengths, Weaknesses, Trends - Microsoft Fabric Community

[Juan-Power-bi]

I also noticed that the data changed , I was about to submit and I see other submissions with different data, do I need to change all? 😞