Access dataset with Microsoft Power BI Import from web

Frictionless Data
1

Hi,
I would like to be able to import your data sets from Power BI without downloading them locally:
http://data.okfn.org/data/core/country-codes
Is it possible to make them available as tables so Power Query can pick them up?

/Ruth

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2

Thanks @ruthpozuelo for suggesting this use case. We have a Trello board for capturing user stories so that interested users can vote and comment on them. I have captured the basics of what you are asking for in a new card on that board:

Do you have any more detail to share about how this would work and how many users might benefit? Thanks again! :thumbsup:

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Hi Dan,

Sure! As a hobbie, I am running a youtube channel teaching
people Power BI and how to use it. I use google analytics a lot on my demos
because it is a fantastic source of data, but I am planning to diversify the sources
to reach a wider audience.

In an upcoming video, planned for this week, I will present
a Power BI Olympics dashboard and to “translate” the IOC country codes to the
ISO codes I have used one of your sources. This is how I got in contact with
your services (superuseful thanks!!).

Now, I will of course credit you for the data:

But the fact that it has to be downloaded instead of pulled
is a big deal breaker, therefore the request.

How big is my audience?

Well, we are a small community but constantly growing. Youtube:62
subscribers and around 1500 video views a month, there is power BI Google +
community as well as Curbal.com with over 200 subscribers there. I also guest
blog for Microsoft’s power bi community with thousands of readers a month.

If I can pull your data sources instead of downloading them,
I will definitely use them more in my demos and probably so will my audience.

One last thing, the source I used was missing some data. How
can I report the mistakes so it gets updated? Can I do it myself?

Thanks,

Ruth

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4

Thanks, this is very useful!

Datasets on data.okfn.org are stored, updated, and managed via GitHub on the “datasets” organization. So you can definitely help curate the dataset using GitHub’s Pull Request process.

Here is the repository for “Country Codes”: GitHub - datasets/country-codes: Comprehensive country code information, including ISO 3166 codes, ITU dialing codes, ISO 4217 currency codes, and many others

5

There is a Power BI Connector for importing data from Github. To import the data I need the github company and repository name…I have never imported anything with it, so I don’t know if it works. I’ll give it a try later.
I am really new to github: do you know of a good tutorial on how to do a pull request?
/Ruth

6

This is straight from the source: About pull requests - GitHub Docs

Another way forward is to open a new issue documenting how the data is wrong: Issues · datasets/country-codes · GitHub

7

Hi Ruth,

Today, we pushed a project to GitHub called datapackage-m which is a small collection of M functions that make working with Tabular Data Packages in Power BI (or Excel) quick and easy.

In your scenario, you can invoke the GetTableFromDataPackage via the Query Editor UI or the Advanced Editor to achieve what you’re after. You can then apply additional transformations before loading the data if required:

let
    Source = GetTableFromDataPackage("https://raw.githubusercontent.com/datasets/country-codes/master/datapackage.json", 0)
in
    Source

Let me know what you think :slight_smile:

Michael

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@michaelamadi this is fantastic - thanks for sharing!

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