Red Gig

One of the most useful functions in Power BI is the ability to connect to data on the internet. One of the benefits of using this method is that any changes to the information on the internet can be updated in the data model using the 'refresh' function.  When you do this for the first time you'll be amazed how easy it is. In this post, I'll show you how to connect to some information on Wikipedia. The process to do this is as follows: 1. With Power BI open, click on 'get data' then 'web' 2. When the next window opens you'll need to paste the URL of the page that contains the information you would like to import into your data model. In this example, I'm using the page  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colors:_A%E2%80%93F 3. Once this is pasted, Power BI will need to understand if any credentials are required to access the web page, in this instance, there are no credentials required so we'll need to ensure 'Anonymous' is selecte...

The need to combine information from multiple files is one that most users of Excel will have come across at some point in the use of Excel. I've personally spent far too many hours aggregating data from multiple files, that are identical in structure, so that I can analyse larger datasets and provide insights into products and processes. For anyone who has also done this and not yet discovered Power Query you'll probably be amazed how simple the process has become. I realise there might be some who will say "just use VBA, its easy once you learn how to code..." and they would be right. The method using Power Query provides a zero code solution that is an evolution of the Excel interface that many will already be familiar with. In this example, I've created a sample file and created a number of duplicates of the file which I've saved in a folder. The folder contains only these files and i'd recommend you do the same if you're looking to try out this pr...