Power Query offers many ways to get data to Excel. One of them is to Web Data import feature. Let’s understand how this works by importing world stock exchange closing data from Google Finance website.
[Related: Introduction to Power Query]
Importing web data in to Excel – Step by step tutorial
Note: You need Power Query for this tutorial. Install Power Query on Excel 2013 (how to) and continue reading.
- Open a blank workbook. Go to Power Query ribbon & click on From Web button. Enter the URL of the webpage from which you want to import the data.
- Your web page will be loaded in to Navigator pane. If there are any tables or other sections of the page that can be readily embedded in Excel, they will show up in the navigation tree structure. Hover on any table to see if that is the data you want. Once you identify what you need, click on Load to get this data in to Excel. If you want to pre-process the data before loading in to Excel, click on Edit.
- Let’s say you have taken Table 0, which contains stock market closing data around the world. When this is edited in Power Query window, it looks like this.
- As you can see, there are 2 problems with this data. (1) Column headers are missing (2) Column 3 should be splitted in to 2 columns.
- Renaming columns: Simply double click on column headers and write whatever header you want.
- Splitting a column: Select column 3 and Click on home > split column button in Power Query window. Specify the delimiter (in our case space should work) and click ok.
- Once column is spitted, our new set up looks like below. Column 3.2 needs further cleaning. We need to remove the brackets ( ).
- Removing the brackets: Select column 3.2 and click on Home > Replace values button. Replace ( with nothing. Repeat the replacement, but this time replace ) with nothing.
- Almost done. Our data is clean. Just change the column titles and we get this:
- Finally load this data to Excel by clicking on “Close & Load” button. Instantly, all this web data will be loaded to Excel as a new table.
How to refresh the imported data?
Simple. Do one of the below:
- Click on “Refresh all” button in Data ribbon of Excel
- Right click on Excel table with web data and choose “Refresh”
- Activate workbook queries pane (from Power Query ribbon) and refresh the query by clicking on the refresh icon at right.
Download Power Query web data – Example workbook
Please click here to download the workbook with Power Query web data extraction example. Right click on the query in workbook queries pane and edit it to understand the pre-processing steps better.
What awesome things can you do with web data in Excel?
Integrating your own data with publicly available sources can lead to interesting analysis situations. Power Query, Power BI & Power Pivot offer several ways to connect to web data (Facebook, Azure market place, Google Analytics etc.) and analyze it in Excel.
Have you tried importing web data to Excel? What has been your experience like? Please share your tips & thoughts in the comments section.
More ways to analyze web data in Excel:
Learn more about analyzing web data in Excel
8 Responses to “Pivot Tables from large data-sets – 5 examples”
Do you have links to any sites that can provide free, large, test data sets. Both large in diversity and large in total number of rows.
Good question Ron. I suggest checking out kaggle.com, data.world or create your own with randbetween(). You can also get a complex business data-set from Microsoft Power BI website. It is contoso retail data.
Hi Chandoo,
I work with large data sets all the time (80-200MB files with 100Ks of rows and 20-40 columns) and I've taken a few steps to reduce the size (20-60MB) so they can better shared and work more quickly. These steps include: creating custom calculations in the pivot instead of having additional data columns, deleting the data tab and saving as an xlsb. I've even tried indexmatch instead of vlookup--although I'm not sure that saved much. Are there any other tricks to further reduce the file size? thanks, Steve
Hi Steve,
Good tips on how to reduce the file size and / or process time. Another thing I would definitely try is to use Data Model to load the data rather than keep it in the file. You would be,
1. connect to source data file thru Power Query
2. filter away any columns / rows that are not needed
3. load the data to model
4. make pivots from it
This would reduce the file size while providing all the answers you need.
Give it a try. See this video for some help - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5u7bpysO3FQ
Normally when Excel processes data it utilizes all four cores on a processor. Is it true that Excel reduces to only using two cores When calculating tables? Same issue if there were two cores present, it would reduce to one in a table?
I ask because, I have personally noticed when i use tables the data is much slower than if I would have filtered it. I like tables for obvious reasons when working with datasets. Is this true.
John:
I don't know if it is true that Excel Table processing only uses 2 threads/cores, but it is entirely possible. The program has to be enabled to handle multiple parallel threads. Excel Lists/Tables were added long ago, at a time when 2 processes was a reasonable upper limit. And, it could be that there simply is no way to program table processing to use more than 2 threads at a time...
When I've got a large data set, I will set my Excel priority to High thru Task Manager to allow it to use more available processing. Never use RealTime priority or you're completely locked up until Excel finishes.
That is a good tip Jen...