When I began building my Power BI and Tableau portfolio, I started looking for public datasets that would let me develop new skills while creating projects I could share. Organizations like FP20 Analytics and Maven Analytics regularly host data challenges, making them a great place to refine skills.
As I was browsing projects, one in particular caught my attention. Maven’s LEGO Challenge invited participants to create an interactive dashboard exploring LEGO sets released between 1970 and 2022 using a dataset of more than 18,000 sets. They also published a guided LEGO Set Explorer project that walks through building an interactive Power BI dashboard.
I decided to use the guided project as the foundation for the first addition to my dashboard portfolio. The resulting dashboard focuses primarily on sets released between 1992 and 2022, where detailed information such as themes, piece counts, recommended ages, retail prices, and product images is available. Along the way I learned several new Power BI techniques, including the Decomposition Tree visualization—which even gave me ideas for a completely different client project analyzing opportunities in mature oil pools.
The LEGO Set Finder dashboard is both practical and fun to explore. If our family is looking for another LEGO project, I can quickly filter the dashboard to show only the Licensed Theme Group, select the Harry Potter theme, and then narrow the results to those recommended for teenagers and adults. Feel free to try that search yourself—or experiment with your own combinations—using the interactive dashboard below. Select any set in the table to view an image and additional details. If you’d like to start over at any point, simply click Reset Filters. You can also select Explore Sets to open a Decomposition Tree visualization, which lets you interactively drill down through theme groups, themes, and individual sets.
While the LEGO Set Finder dashboard was designed to help users discover current sets, I found myself feeling a little nostalgic. I wanted to revisit the LEGO sets I remembered from growing up in the 1980s, so I created a second Historical Set Listing dashboard using the complete dataset back to 1970. Since information such as recommended age and retail price wasn’t consistently available for the older sets, I removed those fields and focused on the attributes that were. I used the filters to rediscover some familiar favourites—many of the sets that once filled that iconic red LEGO storage suitcase.
As part of the dashboard, I also added a simple trend chart showing the number of sets released each year, along with the average and maximum number of pieces per set over time. What surprised me was how stable the trends were for nearly three decades. Through the 1970s, 1980s, and much of the 1990s, the number of sets released each year—and their complexity—changed relatively little. Then, beginning in the late 1990s and accelerating through the 2000s, everything changed. The dashboard could show me what happened, but it couldn’t explain why. To answer that question, I had to step beyond the dashboard and start digging into LEGO’s history.
In the next installment of Reading the Current, we’ll explore what happened to LEGO at the turn of the millennium—and how a simple trend on a chart reflects one of the most fascinating business turnaround stories in recent history. That’s one of the things I enjoy most about analytics. A visualization often marks the beginning of the investigation, not the end.
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