 My name is Jordan McCarthy and I am the data analyst and storyteller at Tech Impact which is a nonprofit that serves the IT needs of other nonprofits. And today I want to talk about how to get your data into Power BI which is a very powerful tool for working with data and visualizing it but more than that for reshaping it, for helping you to take data again in pretty much any form and structuring it in a way that is most useful to you to perform advanced analyses and visualizations and storytelling. I'm going to start by clicking get data and as you can see Power BI offers a wide range of different connectors as they are called to various types of data, many of them in online data systems. The Power BI team is actually adding new connectors to web-based services of various kinds every month pretty much. And you can go online and request specific connectors if they would be useful to you. For now though, I'm going to use one of the more basic kinds of connectors which is likely one that you too will use most regularly which is the basic connector to a local Excel file. And I have a file of a donation that I want to work with here. And here we are, the first stage of data import. So once I've defined where my data is coming from, I'm giving this navigator panel which will show me all of the tables present in whatever source I selected. In Excel spreadsheets, if you have multiple tabs for spreadsheets, each tab will show up as its own entry in this list on the left. In this case though, I only have one tab in this spreadsheet, so it's the only one I want to bring in. What I get here on the right-hand side when I click on something is a preview of the data. And you can't actually do much here. You can really just look at it. This is not the place where you manipulate things. Let's click Edit. And that will take us into Power BI's query editor which is where we can do all of this reshaping that I'm talking about. Now it turns out that in Power BI, there's actually some reshaping you pretty much always have to do no matter what to make your data useful even if it's relatively simple data as this is. One of those things is you'll notice that Power BI sort of arbitrarily assigned very generic column heading names instead of taking the column names from the first row which is what you generally want to happen. There's actually an entire button in Power BI to fix this problem, the use first row as header's button. Lo and behold, now our first row has been promoted to the header area and that means that all of our variables when we go to actually do our visualizations will be named something useful. And the other thing we need to do is that Power BI doesn't generally try to detect what kind of data resides in each column which is important because the kind of data in each column determines what kinds of things you can do to that data. For instance, if you want to create a timeline, you need time data. And as things currently stand, Power BI isn't actually going to be able to find your time column because it's not designated as time. So to change how a column is designated, you just click on it, right click on it, go to the change type option and then go to date and time in this case. And you'll notice actually both when I click the promote header button or the use first rows header button and the type thing that I just did that a new entry appeared over here in this little list of applied steps. This is basically a live interactive log of what you've done to your data to transform it. You can remove steps, reorder them, change them in some cases where the steps are complex at any time. So you can only go back to see what you did to get somewhere which is really useful when you're doing the same kind of operation multiple times over multiple tables. So one other kind of manipulation or type change I need to make to this data is the same principle. I need to classify my donation total column which holds the amount of money that came in with each donation as a number. That's actually all we need to do in this particular data set to get it ready to work with. If I go ahead and click close and apply, the data will be loaded and it'll take a minute, but it really isn't that hard and there's a lot more that you can do here to be shaped data in very advanced ways which I very strongly encourage you to explore.