APIs with Power BI and Other Advanced Techniques

Create a Weather Dashboard to Learn About APIs and JSON

What you'll learn:
How to call an API using Power BI and create a report with the data

Requirements
Recommended you are already familiar with Power BI
If you have completed my Power BI Covid course, then you should be prepared for this course

Description
This course will show you how to use the free OpenWeather API to create an awesome Weather Dashboard. You will learn about connecting to APIs, parameterizing APIs, parsing JSON, dealing with Unix Epoch Time, incorporating emoji into Power BI, dynamically linking to images on the internet, and much more.

This class is an intermediate level class. You should have basic familiarity with Power BI already. We will move quickly, but everything necessary will be covered in the videos.

We will begin by connecting to the (free) OpenWeather API and exploring its contents. Then we will move on to importing this data into Power BI Desktop. We will quickly change this into a parameterized call so that adjustments can be made to it very easily, such as requesting metric units instead of imperial units. Initially we will have JSON data from the API in Power BI. We will go over how to parse this information into a format Power BI can use.

We will then begin formatting our data so that it looks nicer. We will also be covering how to convert from Unix Epoch Time into our more standard datetime format. We’ll make sure to prominently display the last time the data was refreshed so we can make sure we aren’t looking at stale weather data.

We’ll even be incorporating emoji into our report as a quick and easy way to add graphics to Power BI without any plugins or add-ons. Everything in this class is just using out-of-the-box Power BI Desktop.

The report will have multiple charts and other visuals to display a nice, easy to read weather forecast. We’ll go in-depth on how to format these so that they look clean while still displaying important information. And also cover how to link to images hosted on the internet to make the report really pop.

Take this class to learn how to do the complete start-to-finish process of bringing in API data and creating a great looking Power BI report.

Who this course is for
People interested in taking their Power BI skills to the next level