Tag: Power Query

DAX, Power BI, Power BI Desktop, Power BI Service, Power Query

Analyse Your WordPress Website Stats in Power BI

WordPress is one of the most popular open-source website making tools which is vastly used by many bloggers including myself. WordPress developers provide tons of custom plugins to fulfil different needs. But not all of the plugins are well designed and secured.  One of the most interesting pieces of information anyone who owns a website/blog needs is their website statistics. In this post, I explain how to analyse your WordPress website stats in Power BI. Before I start, I want to point out that there is a WordPress stat already available in WordPress Admin Dashboard which provides very informative information about your blog like Total Views, Today Views, Best Ever Views and so forth. You can also install the WordPress app on your mobile device to easily access your website stats. But, the stats WordPress gives me in not enough. I want more. I need a more detailed analysis on

  • Current Month vs. Last Month
  • Current Year Vs. Last Year
  • Most Popular Day of Week
  • Most Popular Month of Year
  • Top 10 Posts

and so on.

As non of the above analysis are available in the normal stats , I decided to build my own version of “WordPress Website Stats Analysis in Power BI”. This gives me the flexibility of creating as much analysis as I need , and… it is so much fun.

If you own a WordPress blog or any other sort of websites or if you’re just curious to learn how to use a website API in Power BI, then this post is for you.

I managed to create a Power BI Desktop template that you can download and use it for free. You’re welcome to modify it based on your needs. You can find the download link at the button of the page.

How It Works

To be able to analyse your WordPress stats in Power BI you need to own a WordPress blog or website. Then a WordPress API key is assigned to your account. The key was included in your WordPress Welcome Email. You can use that API key in Power BI Desktop to create your customised reports and analyse your blog/website stats then you can publish the model into Power BI Service that is accessible anytime anywhere. You can also create your own dashboard in Power BI Service.  Moreover, you can setup Schedule Refresh for the dataset to refresh your dashboards and reports automatically.

Requirements

You’ll need to

  • own a WordPress blog/website and have the API assigned to your account
  • install the Jetpack plugin in your blog/website as WordPress stats is no longer maintained and you should not use it. Instead, you can install the Jetpack plugin
  • have Power BI Desktop installed on your machine (Download it from here, it’s free!)
  • have a Power BI account (Don’t have an account? Signup for it here, it’s free too!)
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DAX, Excel, Power BI, Power BI Desktop, Power Map, Power Pivot, Power Query, Power View, Self-Service BI, T-SQL

How to Overcome Map Related Issues in Power BI, Power View and Power Map

One of the most powerful features in Power BI and Excel is supporting geospatial visualisations. In Excel we can use Map visualisation in Power View, or use Power Map directly. In Power BI, as you know, there are two built-in visualisations supporting geographic coordinate data, Map and Filled map. They work beautifully if you have enough data supported by Bing Maps. But, there are some issues with Map visualisations in both Power BI and Excel. In this post I address some of the issues I faced myself and I’ll provide the solutions for the issues. As “Filled Map” and “Map” visualisations in Power BI are very similar my focus in this post would be on “Map” visualisation. My intention is not explaining Power View and Power Map that much so my focus in this article would be on Power BI more than the other two.

Requirements

To experiment everything I explain in this post you need to have:

  • The new SQL Server sample, WideWorldImportersDW (WWI). You can download it here
  • The latest version on Power BI Desktop (current version is 2.35.4399.381 64-bit (May 2016))
  • Excel 2016 or Excel 2013

If you use Excel 2016, then you need to turn on Power View on.

Check this out if you want to learn more about BI features in Excel 2016.

Get Data in Power BI

  • Open Power BI Desktop
  • Get Data from SQL Server Database
  • Select Fact.Sales and Dimension.City then load data

Power BI Desktop

Map Issues In Power BI

Wrong Cities in Power BI

  • Expand the “Dimension City” table
  • Select “City” column then change its Data Category to City (Data Category is on “Modeling” tab from the ribbon)

Power BI Desktop Data Category

  • Put a Map visual into the page
  • Put “City” on Location
  • Put “Total Excluding Tax” on Size

Power BI Desktop Map

As you see sales distributed across different countries, but, this is not quiet right.

  • Put a slicer on the page then put “Country” on the slicer
  • Click “United States” to filter the Map

Power BI Desktop Slicer

Oops! This is not quiet right. What happened is that Bing Map Engine gets confused with the city names so that it shows a city with the same name outside of the US, just like New Plymouth which a city in New Zealand, but, the New Plymouth we have in our data source is the New Plymouth from Idaho in the US.

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Power BI, Power BI Desktop, Power Query, Uncategorized

Power BI and Google Maps API (Address Lookup)

In this post I explain how to use Google Maps APIs to retrieve useful information out of Google Maps. The use case scenario could be getting address, postal code, etc. from existing latitude and longitude values. The data could be generated by any sort of GPS tracking device like your Garmin cycling GPS computer, your Fitbit watch etc. I know you can load your GPS tracking data into athletic social networks to analyse your activities. But, if you want to do some more specific data analytics like in which area of the city you created more power during your cycling activities then those websites might not give you what you want for free.

For instance, you can export your device data to CSV then import and append all CSV files into a Power BI model and create amazing analytical reports. How to import your CSV files into a Power BI model is out of scope of this article so I leave it to you for any further investigations.

GPS tracking devices are creating lots of data including geographic coordinates which can be easily used in Power BI. You can simply put latitude and longitude on a Map visualisation and you’re good to go.

Power BI Map using Coordinates

You can also concatenate the latitude and longitude data and use it as Location in your Map visualisation.

Power BI Map using Location

This can be done from Query Editor in M language.

Creating Location from Latitude and Longitude in Power BI

But, in some cases you need some more geo-information like Country, City, Post Code and Street Address in a table as well. Or you might want to use postal code in a slicer. In this article I show you how to get all of these information out of Google Maps by passing existing coordinates to Google Maps geocoding API.

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Power BI, Power BI Desktop, Power BI Web App, Power Query

Data Visualisation with Power BI Desktop

As most of you guys know Power BI Desktop is released. I should say, it’s awesome. There are heaps of changes in compare with its preview edition Power BI Designer. I’ve written a series of posts regarding creating a report and dashboard using Power BI Designer before. You can find them here. Now I want to explain the same thing in Power BI Desktop. I’ll cover lots of new features in this post and I hope you enjoy it.

Get Data

  • Open Power BI Desktop
  • Click on Get Data. You can also get data from recent data sources or even open a predefined report stored in pbix format

Power BI Desktop 01

  • We use Adventure Works DW 2012 database as sample, you can open your real world data source
  • Click on “SQL Server Database” then “Connect”
  • In this sample we are connecting to a “SQL Server Database”
  • Click “Connect”

Power BI Desktop 02

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