Power BI Data Visualization World Champs - Round 3 is LIVE

[slindsay]

Check out the winners of round 1 & round 2!

Power BI Dataviz World Champs - Round 3 of 3 is now closed!

The prelims are officially entering their final week! You’ve tackled global trends, explored climate signals, and shown off some incredible creativity so far. Now we’re closing out the preliminary rounds with a challenge rooted in 125+ years of legendary achievements, global competition, and the spirit of the Olympic Games.

This is your last chance to qualify directly for the finals - before our judges step in next week to select the Wildcard Finalist.

And a quick update: to give our judges a little more time to review the amazing Week 1 entries, the announcement dates have shifted slightly. Week 1 winners will now be announced on January 28. Thank you for your patience - they’re worth the wait!

A huge thank‑you to the hundreds of you who’ve spent your precious time learning, creating, and sharing with us - it's been incredible to see so many community members show up, be brave, and learn in public together.

Theme: A Century of Olympic History - Athletes, Nations, and Moments That Shaped the Games

This week, you’ll be diving into a rich, multi‑table dataset covering the Summer and Winter Olympics from 1896–2022. Explore medal outcomes, athlete stories, shifts in national performance, gender representation, long‑term trends, era‑to‑era changes, and anything else that inspires you.

We picked this dataset because the 2026 Winter Olympics kick off on February 6, and there is something magical about exploring more than a century of Olympic history right as the world gears up for the next chapter.

📊 Starter Semantic Model (Week 3)

This round features a structured model built around three main tables - perfect for historical analysis, comparison, storytelling, and deep‑dive exploration.

1. hosts

Metadata for each Games: host city, country, season, start/end dates.
Use this to tie athletes and results to specific Olympics.

2. athletes

One row per athlete, with biographical details, appearance history, total medals, and more.
Ideal for athlete‑focused stories or tracking long careers.

3. results

The central fact table. Each row is a single athlete’s result in a specific event, including medal type, country codes, and links back to both athlete and Games.

4. result_athletes

A small but necessary bridge table to support the many‑to‑many relationship between athletes and results.

Download the starter semantic model.

📚 Data Source

Kaggle — Olympic Games Medals, 1896–2022
License: Creative Commons CC BY‑NC‑SA 4.0

Note: This dataset has been modified by Microsoft MVP Stephanie Bruno. To consume the data as it appears in the semantic model, please visit Stephanie's GitHub.

This dataset is open, remixable, and perfect for storytelling—as long as all additional data you add is openly licensed and cited.

🎯 Your Task

Tell a story from Olympic history using Power BI. You can explore:

• National performance over time
• Gender representation and progress
• Era‑to‑era shifts in athletic achievement
• Which countries dominated which sports
• The rise of new events or nations
• Surprising correlations or long‑term patterns
• Anything else the data inspires!

Your goal is not just to visualize—it’s to reveal something meaningful.

 

🛠️ Report Requirements

Structure

• Maximum of 5 report pages
  (Custom canvases permitted—just keep the content roughly equivalent.)

Visual Requirements

Include at least one core visual such as a:

• Line chart, Bar/column chart, Scatterplot, Map
  
  

Data Requirements

You can transform, reshape, or aggregate freely. You can also add open‑source supporting datasets—just cite them.

Accessibility Requirements

• ≥4.5:1 contrast ratio
• Alt text for every visual
• Avoid using color alone for meaning
• Ensure a proper keyboard navigation order

 

👀 Who Is Viewing This Report?

Audience
Sports analysts, journalists, Olympic historians, fans, and global stakeholders.

What They Need
Reports that help them understand:

• How athletes and nations have evolved over time
• How medal trends shifted across eras
• The emergence (or decline) of specific sports
• The stories and patterns behind Olympic achievements
  
  

They want clear, insight‑rich visuals that show both the big picture and the compelling details.

 

📬 How to Submit

• Publish to the Power BI Contests gallery
• Include “Week 3:” in your post title
  Example: “Week 3: The Evolution of Olympic Medal Trends”
• Choose category World Champs ATL
• Add a short description of what you explored
• Share your link in the contest thread below this post
  
  

🏆 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!  
  
  

🏆 What’s Next?

This is the final week of prelims.

At the end of Week 3, the judges will:

• Select the Week 3 finalists
• Begin evaluations to choose one wildcard finalist from the entire set of submissions across Weeks 1–3
  
  

Finalists will receive a FabCon ATL conference pass + 3 hotel nights in Atlanta. Top entries also get featured on the Power BI Community site!

Ready to make your mark?

This is your last chance to secure a spot among the finalists before the wildcard selection begins. Dive into the data, explore over a century of Olympic stories, and bring the Games to life in Power BI.

Good luck - and let’s close out the prelims with a strong finish!

[vivmueller]

Following problems in the dataset:

• The 'results' [result_id] column has a relationship with 'result athletes' [result id] and then 'result athletes' [Athlete URL] to the 'athletes' table.
  
  
  But this relationship doesn't work for all rows, as the 'result athletes' [Athlete URL] column has many blanks:
  
  This means, the relationship between 'results' and 'athletes' is not reliable. It will deliver some results, but not all. The athletes for those games and medals are missing.

• The birth years of the athletes are not correct, some are even blank. For example Harrison Smith, Birth Year 1997 (!), had his first competition in 1900. 
  He was born 1876: Harrison Smith (runner) - Wikipedia
  

• In the 'results' table, some countries have different names, like "Federal Republic of Germany" (official name) or just "Germany". Virgin Islands (British or USA) also have each 2 names, among other countries, but they have the same country_code. On the other hand, not all countries have the country_code, sometimes some countries miss it for some rows (like Norway or Nigeria). So if you use country or country_code to count medals, whatever you use will have some issues. 

• The numbers given are also sometimes wrong. Like the amount of disciplines performed per year, not all of them are listed, sometimes 1-2 are missing. So if you want to count (distinct count) how many disciplines or events were in a year, the numbers may not be accurate or the same as if you compare with the real data.

• If using the csv files, there will be errors in the column 'olympic_results' [value_unit], as this column has different formats (time, numbers or text) and can not be parsed from csv. The easiest way is to format it as text (or delete it, if not needed).

[LearningGuy]

Just searching for some clarity here! 
Are we marked on accuracy of outputs? The data set has a huge number of issues with it. like vivmuellers example, among many other things, such as medalists not being recorded in the results side. For my own example Jakov Fak who recieved two medals throughout his career has 0 in the data set. It makes placing any emphasis on athletic excellence a lot harder when you see a min debut age of -97 and an avg of 87. 
I understand Accuracy is not a judging component but insightfullness becomes a little funky when the data is so obscurely skewed. 
Please let me know!

[HRL]

Hi

Is it possible to increase the file size limit for the contest gallery? I added additional data, which is why the file is now too large.

Thank you!

[Little-Wolf]

Here is my Week 3 entry Week 3: The Olympics - Microsoft Fabric Community

Any feedback is always appritiated! 

[JesusNunez]

Hello guys!

Here’s my first-ever participation in the Power BI Contest - Week 3: Inside Olympic Greatness. 

I had a lot of fun working on it, hope you like it!

[LearningGuy]

Hi everyone! 

This is my first ever entry in a Microsoft Fabric Power BI Contest, it was a lot of fun building this report, and I hope you find interest in it! Week 3: The Olympics - A Historic Summary - Microsoft Fabric Community

[slindsay]

@vivmueller and @LearningGuy - sincere apologies for my delayed response - and thank you for pointing out the data issues. I'm sorry this dataset was such a bear!

Because of the issues with the dataset, we will not be judging this week's contest on data accuracy. We do welcome you to add additional data if you find it helpful. 

Thanks for so clearly laying out the challenges for everyone!

[slindsay]

@HRL - I sent you a PM - we can figure something out.

[JoselynFranco]

Hi everyone!

This is my first time participating in a Microsoft Fabric Power BI Contest. Building this report was both challenging and exciting, and I truly enjoyed the creative and analytical process behind it.

Week 3: OLYMP – The Evolution of the Olympic Games (1896–2022) 
I hope you find it interesting and that it offers a meaningful look into Olympic history through data visualization. Thank you for taking the time to explore it! 

[slindsay]

Another first time participant!! Welcome to the club @JoselynFranco! Thanks so much for spending time with us - I can't wait to take a closer look at your entry!

[TauSol]

Hello!

I'd like to submit my take on the report. Hope you enjoy it!
It's my first time, and I actually missed first 2 weeks, but thankfully managed to get this one done. 🙂

Week 3: Olympic evolution and global shift - Microsoft Fabric Community

[Juan-Power-bi]

Hi everyone last chance 🤞

Here it is my entry Vamos!!!! https://community.fabric.microsoft.com/t5/Contests-Gallery/Week-3-Final-Chance-Olympic-games-Deep-Di...

[Gbemisola]

Hello everyone, I just submitted my entry for this round. I took a different approach by exploring sprint dominance among Jamaican women, pls check it out and give a thumbs up if you liked it! Thank you
https://community.fabric.microsoft.com/t5/Contests-Gallery/Week-3-The-Fastest-Women-of-Jamaica/td-p/...

[fj1]

Here is the link to my submission:

https://community.fabric.microsoft.com/t5/Contests-Gallery/Week-3-A-Century-of-Olympic-History/td-p/...

[Coffeyamc]

@slindsay I also was not able to attach my PBIX file to my submission due to exceeding the 47MB limit.