Web as a source

One pleasant surprise to many Power BI Developers is the availability of a web connector. Using this connection type allows you to source data from files that are stored on a website or even data that has been embedded into an HTML table on the web page. Using this type of connector can often be helpful when you would like to supplement your internal corporate data sources with information that can be publicly found on the internet.

For this example, imagine you are working for a major automobile manufacturer in the United States. You have already designed a Power BI solution using data internally available within your organization that shows historical patterns in sales trends. However, you would like to determine whether there are any correlations in periods of historically higher fuel prices and lower automobile sales. Fortunately, you found that the United States Department of Labor publicly posts historical average consumer prices of many commonly purchased items, including fuel prices.

1. Now that you understand the scenario within the Power BI Desktop, select the Get Data button and choose Web as your source. You will then be prompted to provide the URL where the data can be found. In this example, the data can be found by searching on the website Data.Gov (https://www.data.gov/) or, to save you some time, use the direct link: https://download.bls.gov/pub/time.series/ap/ap.data.2.Gasoline. Once you provide the URL, click OK:

2. Next, you will likely be prompted with an Access Web Content dialog box. This is important when you are using a data source that requires a login to access. Since this data source does not require a login to find the data, you can simply select anonymous access, which is the default, and then click Connect:

Notice on the next screen that the Power BI Desktop recognizes the URL provided as a tab-delimited file that can now easily be added to any existing data model you have designed.