[How To] Connect to CSV data in Power BI Desktop 

[How To] Connect to CSV data in Power BI Desktop 

One of the most common import-export data formats that you will come across is the infamous CSV dataset. CSV data files, or comma-separated values, are a delimited text file that uses a comma to separate values. It is very well designed for semi-structured data that can be represented as columns and rows. Each line of a file is a data record and each one of those records contains one or more fields separated by commas.  

You will very commonly come across CSV data when exporting data from internal reporting systems like CRM or ERP systems, or from national bureaus of data (i.e. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Statistics Canada, OECD Statistics). 

Data in the CSV format allows for data to be easily loaded into a variety of application including Power BI. Let’s take a look at how we can connect to CSV data in Power BI Desktop. 

In the Power BI Desktop application, we will expand the Get data tab. After expanding this menu, we will see a variety of options but for the sake of connecting CSV data we are going to choose the Text/CSV option.  

Once selected, the file explorer should open and we can select the data file we wish to open in Power BI Desktop and click Open.  

After the CSV data loads, we will be presented with a few options for our data. It should give us the option to load or transform our data. If we need to clean up our data, or do any sort of data transformation, we will click on Transform data. But, if our data has already been cleaned and is ready for visualizing, we can just click Load. 

Once our data is loaded into the model, we will be able to see it in the Fields section of Power BI on the right. In the field section, we can expand our table to see all the columns of the data. Now, we are ready to bring this data onto the canvas and start creating our visualizations! 

Using the method we just learned, we can import our CSV data files into Power BI Desktop, making it much easier to work with external datasets. This allows us to bring data from the most common data format into our reports.  

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