Book Image

Extending Power BI with Python and R

By : Luca Zavarella
Book Image

Extending Power BI with Python and R

By: Luca Zavarella

Overview of this book

Python and R allow you to extend Power BI capabilities to simplify ingestion and transformation activities, enhance dashboards, and highlight insights. With this book, you'll be able to make your artifacts far more interesting and rich in insights using analytical languages. You'll start by learning how to configure your Power BI environment to use your Python and R scripts. The book then explores data ingestion and data transformation extensions, and advances to focus on data augmentation and data visualization. You'll understand how to import data from external sources and transform them using complex algorithms. The book helps you implement personal data de-identification methods such as pseudonymization, anonymization, and masking in Power BI. You'll be able to call external APIs to enrich your data much more quickly using Python programming and R programming. Later, you'll learn advanced Python and R techniques to perform in-depth analysis and extract valuable information using statistics and machine learning. You'll also understand the main statistical features of datasets by plotting multiple visual graphs in the process of creating a machine learning model. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to enrich your Power BI data models and visualizations using complex algorithms in Python and R.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
1
Section 1: Best Practices for Using R and Python in Power BI
5
Section 2: Data Ingestion and Transformation with R and Python in Power BI
11
Section 3: Data Enrichment with R and Python in Power BI
17
Section 3: Data Visualization with R in Power BI

Logging to Excel files

As you probably already know, Microsoft Excel is spreadsheet software available in the Microsoft Office suite. It's one of the most widely used tools in the world for storing and organizing data in a table format. It is very popular in companies because it allows business data to be shared between departments and enables individual users to do their own data analysis directly and quickly without the help of the IT department.

Early versions of Excel stored information in files of the Excel Sheet (XLS) format. This is a proprietary Microsoft format, based on the Binary Interchange File Format (BIFF). It has been the default format for versions from v7.0 (Excel 95) to v11.0 (Excel 2003). From version 8.0 to 11.0 the XLS format can handle 64K (216 = 65,536) rows and 256 columns (28). Starting with version v12.0 (Excel 2007), the default format has changed to Excel Open XML Spreadsheet (XLSX). This is based on the Office Open XML format, and it is based on...