Make a Breaking Bad Heatmap in Power BI
Introduction
Breaking Bad is one of the top rated TV shows, so I decided to make a heatmap that shows the IMDB ratings for each episode in the 5 seasons.
In this post, I'll quickly show you how to make this heatmap, and you'll learn how to create a matrix and apply color formatting to the values inside the matrix.
I'll be using Power BI to make this visual, but at the end of this post, I'll show you how you can build the same thing in Excel.
Where I got the Data
I did not make this dataset myself. Thank you so much to whoever compiled all the information on each Breaking Bad episode: https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/varpit94/breaking-bad-tv-show-all-seasons-episodes-data
Preparing the Data
Before I start making the visual, I need to clean up the data by getting rid of any unncessary columns. Now, when you import the data from your local computer onto Power BI, make sure to hit "Transform Data".
This will open up the Power Query Editor, which should look like this:
Here, we can make changes to our dataset. I'm going to get rid of ALL of the columns except for the ones called "Season", "Episode", and "Rating_IMDB".
To get rid of columns, right click the column name and hit "Remove". You should see the step show up on the "Applied Steps" pane:
So, after you remove all the columns, you should be left with 3 columns.
Now, hit "Close and Apply" on the top left corner:
We're ready to move on to the next step...
Making the Heatmap
Before we do anything, make sure that you're in the "Report" tab that looks like this:
Creating the Basic Matrix
First, we need to make a matrix that will display all the IMDB ratings:
This will open a blank matrix:
Now, drag "Episode" from the data into the rows of the matrix, drag "Season" into the columns of the matrix, and drag "Rating_IMDB" into the values of the matrix:
This is what the result looks like so far:
Styling the Matrix
This is optional, but the numbers in the matrix look pretty ugly right now. You can make them look cleaner by changing the style to "Minimal":
Here's what you should get:
The "Total" columns look pretty annoying, so let's remove that by toggling "Column subtotals" and "Row subtotals" off:
Now, the matrix looks a lot better!
Adding Color
This isn't a heatmap until we add color to it. To add a color gradient to this matrix, go to "Cell elements", and then toggle the "Background color" on, like this:
Here's what it looks like now:
But the Breaking Bad color theme isn't really blue. It's more of a combination of yellow and green, so that's what my color gradient is going to be.
To edit the color scheme, click on the button that says "fx":
Once you click that, you can fiddle around with the different colors. Here's the colors that I chose (you can use whatever colors you want!):
The Final Result
... and that's what my final heatmap looks like. I hope you followed along with this blog post and drop down your heatmaps in the comments! I look forward to seeing them 😄!
Making this Breaking Bad Heatmap inside of Excel
You can also make a Breaking Bad Heatmap in Excel (it's slightly different than making it in Power BI)! If you want to learn how to do that, then check out this video: https://youtu.be/a-41Bxh-u3k