We’re continuing our series of posts about connecting data with how to connect to data on a website!

It’s nice and easy to connect to data on a website the data is nicely structured in some kind of table. So, it’s just like connecting to other kinds of data… Power BI looooves structure and predictability in a data source.

Video:

Written Instructions:

We’ll be using the MLB standings page on the website baseball-reference.com. It’s a perfect example of well-structured data on a website that we can connect to.

We’ll start off with a blank report in Power BI Desktop, and click the Get data button in the home ribbon up at the top and select the Web option.

You’ll then get a From Web window that asks for a URL.

We’re going to use the URL for the standings page on baseball-reference.com:

Then click that green OK button.

Power BI will work for a minute and then pop up a Navigator window where it will show you what data tables it found at the URL you gave it.

The data on this page is actually so well structured that it gives us pretty accurate table names under the HTML Tables section, showing us tables for the 6 Divisions across the American and National Leagues.

It also has a Table of exactly what we’re looking for, called Major League Baseball Detailed Standings and if we click on that one we get a preview of our data table.

Since this is what we are looking for, we’ll check the checkbox beside this table, and then click Load.

You’ll see your Data Pane populate with all the columns in this table, and if we check the Table View of this report now, we’ll see everything has been brought in.

This always works the best with well-structured data, because that’s the data Power BI likes best.

Take care everyone,

Joe.

More posts about Connecting Data to Power BI:

Posts about Power BI Admin:

Like these posts but need more formal (but still engaging and fun) training in Power BI? Contact me, Joe Travers or at joe@traversdata.com. I got you.