This blog post is going to be specifically geared towards those in the larger Power BI community that do not know about the community initiative called #SportsVizSunday. If you are currently aware of the initiative, this might be a little boring for you unless you want to try out some Power BI and connect to data.world that way, so if that’s you keep reading.

What is #SportsVizSunday?

#SportsVizSunday is a data viz community initiative lead by myself, Simon Beaumont, James Smith, and Chris Westlake that started with mostly Tableau users coming together to visualize sports data and share it via Twitter. Every month we share a data set pertaining to sports and share it on our data dot world site as well as our website, sportsvizsunday.com. Participants take that data, visualize or analyze it, then share their work on twitter using the #SportsVizSunday hashtag and then we share all of the contributions in a weekly round up Twitter thread on Sunday showcasing everyone’s work. You can also share any sported related analysis, viz, or infographic with this hashtag so that our community is able to find it easily.

Although this has generally been a Tableau-centric initiative, we would love to get more participants from different platforms, like Power BI, involved. The goal of this blog post is to show Power BI users how to access our data and show how simple it is in Power BI to grab this data directly from the web.

Getting Sports Data From Our Site

First, open up your Power BI desktop and then Power Query Editor. Click New Source and then choose the Web option. You will be prompted to put in a URL. Open up your internet, go to our data dot world site, and find the latest monthly project. In this case we are going to be looking at all NBA shot locations since 1997. Navigate within the project to the actual data set as shown below.

Now that you are in the data set click on the data set name that you want to bring into Power BI on the left. You can see that the Download and Open in App options have now appeared in the top right of this page.

Click on the Download button. You will get three options (see below). You can to click on the Share URL option to get the correct link to input into Power BI.

Once you click Share URL you will see a pop out like below. This gives you the download link that you can click Copy and paste into the URL box in Power BI. At this point Power BI will ingest this data like any other Web based data set. Now that you’ve brought the data into Power Query you will be able to pivot and manipulate however you see fit.

Conclusion

This process is very easy, but I wanted to walk Power BI users through it so that you know how easy it is to grab the data for the monthly challenges. The community is extremely open and accepting and would love to see dashboards from other BI platforms. If you have any questions or concerns feel free to reach out to myself, James, Simon, or Chris. We would love to help make sure that you’re totally comfortable participating in this initiative. Hope to see some of your dashboards soon!