Chapter 4: Importing Unhandled Data Objects

In this chapter, you'll look at using R and Python in what is typically the first phase of report creation: data ingestion. Power BI is a very powerful tool from this point of view, because it has many connectors to various data sources out of the box. In addition to being able to import data directly by connecting to data sources, you can easily solve more complex data loading scenarios with Power BI. For example, you can merge multiple CSV files or multiple Excel workbook sheets dynamically directly from Power BI, even using the M language to apply special logic to the merge step. You can also scrape any web page by just clicking on the web page contents without using any code. All this is possible thanks to Power BI's standard features, without having to use R or Python.

There are, however, cases in which the data to be imported and used in Power BI comes from processing done on external systems, which persists data in formats...