Playing with Power BI

A quick post to get my mind off of the world.

I’ve doing some playing around with Power BI and how it works in pulling in data from the web. I know that it can do it but I wanted to play around with the data on the coronavirus that is being loaded into Wikipedia. Very soon I will stop doing that because the topic distresses me.

And because the data is changing every day, Wikipedia, or the “editors” (I don’t know what the writers participating are called) often change the layout of the tables so that Power Bi can’t pull in the data. Power BI says it can’t find the table. Because of the fluidity of the situation on a day to day basis, it is not feasible. It is somewhat easier to do updates using power query in excel – at least it’s easier for me – but I still have to frequently re-do the whole connection because the naming of the table changes.

So that’s something I learned from playing around with Power BI and power query: if something is in flux and changes on a day to day basis and doesn’t have a set of rules for maintaining consistent set ups or layouts, then pulling data from the web will be a bit more troublesome.

It is just the nature of how Wikipedia works.