Actually building a dashboard for the Power BI Data Viz World Championship!

Oke, I'll be honest:

I'm a Fabric man at heart. Lakehouses, pipelines, notebooks, that's my natural habitat.

So when I first heard about the Power BI Data Viz Championship during Data Days, I wasn’t exactly excited. Could I actually build something nice? Something shiny and polished? Honestly… I didn’t think so..

Fast forward to now. Round 1 has already passed, and I decided to just go for it. My agenda was packed, but I still managed to make time and participate. It felt like a deliberate step back into “proper” Power BI, and I’m really glad I did.

First of all, the topic was great. Football. And with the 2026 World Cup around the corner, it felt like the perfect opportunity to mix fun with work. Let’s see if I could learn something new along the way.

Starting from a blank canvas reminded me how much craftsmanship lives in the reporting layer. Modelling data is one thing, but making it tell a story on a page is a completely different skill. And this project definitely stretched that muscle.

While building the report, I was genuinely surprised by how many options exist within just a single visual. There’s so much to think about.

Text positioning, visuals, lines, shapes, backgrounds, titles, subtitles, axes, tooltips, themes… the list goes on. KPI cards, ribbon charts, a decomposition tree. Eventually, it all came together. At one point, I was searching for a specific setting to align visuals perfectly. It took me 30 minutes… AAAAH. Even Copilot didn’t give me the right answer at first.

Along the way, I kept running into some key questions:

• What should I actually show to answer the business question?
• What does the data really look like?
• Do I need new measures to generate insights?
• What makes a great dashboard page?
• And of course… how can I make it feel like football?

These are the kinds of questions you have to answer to build a strong dashboard. And on top of that, there’s the design to consider. Put it all together, and this is far from a simple exercise. It’s a real learning experience.

I also watched the announcement video for the championship on Reactor Live with Valerie Junk and Lakshmi Ponnurasan. Lakshmi shared some great tips for building impactful dashboards, which gave me even more inspiration to push this further. See below.

For me, point two made immediate sense. You first need to understand the data before you can present the right things. That’s exactly how I approached it. I started with exploring the data and only shaped the story afterwards.

Another point that really stood out was the last one: iterate, iterate, iterate. That’s definitely what I did. I designed multiple executive landing pages and, over time, selected the one that felt right. Only after that did I finalize my KPIs and visuals and bring everything together into the final report. Lakshmi actually shared a great game plan for this, which you can see below.