From the course: Learning Data Analytics: 1 Foundations

Working with connections

- [Instructor] You may have learned how to build some pretty powerful data sets already just using flat files. You may discover that leveraging connections to data will actually enhance your productivity and be easier for you on your refreshes. If there's one specific area in data software that has grown besides cleaning and transforming and visualizing data, it's the connections to the data. I can remember early in my career that some of the only ways I could connect to certain data at some companies was actually through ODBC connections that were set up on my machine by the IT group. Today, just good old fashioned Excel will tap into a lot of live data sources. Let's take a look. Okay, so I'll go to Data and Get Data. Now, if I'm choosing things like From File, of course, I'm pulling in probably a flat file. But look, I can connect to all sorts of databases. Assuming that I have a username and permissions to that file, I'm able to tap into it from Excel. You also see other services like From Azure or From Online Services, and then of course From Other Services. Almost every connection is covered. Okay, let's take a look at some of the connection availability in Power BI, and I'll use Power BI Desktop. Okay, I'll choose get data from another source. Or from up top, I can do Get Data and choose More. You see all of the different connections available to you. Again, as long as you have a username, password, and permissions to that data, you're able to connect to it. Again, Power BI uses Power Query for data transformation and cleaning and then also Power BI has visualizations. When you connect directly to the data, then you're using your software to interface with that data. When the data and the source system is updated, then the data in your file is updated. You're basically cutting out the middleman, and you're knocking out a lot of potential issues along the way.

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