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  • Connecting to APIs with Power BI (Power Query)–Part 1 of 2

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    Why is it so complex to connect to an API with Power BI or Power Query? The OAuth explained

    It’s easier to explain using analogies, so let’s go with that!

    Analogy: Imagine that you have a gym subscription and this gym also has a VIP lounge, but to get to the lounge you need to head to the front-desk to get authorization for a limited time.

    Using MailChimp as an example:

    • The gym is actually MailChimp – they put all the facilities for you
    • The lounge section is their API and its where you can “access” your data
    • The front-desk authorization is what we know as a Authorization Token, which grants us the chance to “be” in the API

    I’m overly simplifying things here, but the main idea is that the “vip lounge” is the place that the “gym” gives you to do what they give you access to do. They (the gym) could give you access to read, write, delete or modify “data”.

  • Advanced Power Query and other questions from ‘M is for Data Monkey’ readers

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    The #1 Power Query book in sales and ratings. THANK YOU everyone Sonrisa

    A little over a year ago, Ken Puls and I published a book called ‘M is for Data Monkey’ which came out from a cycle of iterations over our Live Online Workshop. The book, in essence, is a summarized version of our Workshop with some Key concepts and examples that we used back then in our Power Query Training Workshop. Of course, Power Query has changed and our online workshop has changed as well. We keep our workshop fresh and up to date with the latest and the greatest, but the book is still relevant and will keep being relevant for many years to come even if some of the new UI or feature changes are not reflected in the book.

    It’s crazy how well our book as been received across the globe with over 4.5 stars average on most of the reviews that we receive. Here’s a few of the reviews that some of the readers have left on the Amazon US site:

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  • New Functionality in Power BI Desktop–January 2017

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    Almost every month the Power BI team delivers a new version of the Power BI Desktop with some new connector, new ways to visualize data and some other ways to work even easier with your data model or your ‘Get Data’ experience.

    The one that I loved this time and that might not be completely visible for most people is the new extract values from a nested list. The whole reason why this might not be visible to most users is that you almost never see a List when working with just the UI of Power Query. So, how do we even get to use this new feature?

    Let’s try with a simple example:

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    A table with stats on some marathon races with fields like, Marathon ID, the Name of the participant and the place or rank that the participant got on each marathon

    We would like to work our way from the table on the left to the one on the right.