Exercise on Connecting a Google Sheet to MS power BI

What you will learn is hot to connect to the Google Sheet Docs from MS Power BI without using an
ODBC.

Step 1

Access you google sheet

Step 2

Inside Google Sheet click File Share as shown on the image below:

Good Sheet now displays some options available to you so that you can get the data on the sheet and
“link” it to MS Power BI.

Note – please read carefully that there are “security issues related” to your choice.
 1

For this demonstration, simply click the Copy link icon, as shown with the arrow pointing to it.

Upon clicking the “Copy link” option, a message should appear on your screen, as shown below:

Now you need to open MS Word or Notepad, as you have to type this “link text” URL to either Word or
Notepad.

It should look like this (of course this would vary depending on Google Sheet and you credentials
attached to it. Below is the URL which “points” to your google sheet:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1X4IL_6F5lxBEQL_w_IFt-
PVshwdBvySRaN7Dop4m5zs/edit?usp=sharing
You will also need to “pre-type” the following inside your Word or Notepad

/export?format=xlsx
Make sure that you do not have spaces before and after this text.
Now edit the “link” which you initially got from Google Sheet.
On the last part of that link, simply remove the text with the “/” and on to the last text of it.

Replace this “red bordered” text with the one which says:

/export?format=xlsx
Now it should read like this:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1X4IL_6F5lxBEQL_w_IFt-
PVshwdBvySRaN7Dop4m5zs/export?format=xlsx

This link is the URL address which we shall paste into MS Power BI.
Now go to MS power BI
Get Data | Web
To quickly goto the Web option, simply type Web on the search box available, as shown on the
screen image below:
 2

Choose Web
Then click Connect

You should now be able to see the following dialogue screen image:
 2

Now you have to paste here the URL which you got and edited earlier (the URL is shown below):

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1X4IL_6F5lxBEQL_w_IFt-
PVshwdBvySRaN7Dop4m5zs/export?format=xlsx
This is how it should look like:

Then simply click the OK button, and should be able to see the following screen:
At this point, simply choose the defaulted “Sheet1”, as shown above and then click Edit.
Now you should be able to see the Google Sheet content available to you for editing/transformation and
data visualization.

To test if it really works, try to edit or add more data inside your Google Sheet, and simply Click the
Home | Refresh All inside MS Power BI, and you should be able to see the results of your edit and/or
append which you have done inside Google Sheet appear on MS Power BI.

Congratulations!

End of Exercise 27.