Advanced Analytics in Power BI with R and Python: Ingesting, Transforming, Visualizing

© Ryan Wade 2020

R. WadeAdvanced Analytics in Power BI with R and Pythonhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-5829-3_4

4. Reading Excel Files

Ryan Wade¹ 

(1)

Indianapolis, IN, USA

 

Power BI has built-in tools that enable you to read Microsoft Excel files into the Power BI data model. The built-in functionality is intuitive and easy to use for simple workflows, but things can become unnecessarily difficult when the workflows get complicated. Many workflows that are difficult to do using native Power BI tools are relatively easy to do using R or Python. We will illustrate with an example.

Here is the scenario:

• It is February 2, 2014, and you are the CFO of Contoso International.

• You receive sales data by year via MS Excel workbooks from your IT department, ...