How to Upload Data to Power BI

Building an insightful dashboard starts with one essential step: getting your data into the visualization tool. If you're using Power BI, its power comes from its ability to connect to hundreds of different data sources. This guide will walk you through the most common and practical ways to upload your data into Power BI, from simple spreadsheets to online services.

Before You Begin: The Essentials

To get started, you really only need two things:

• Power BI Desktop: This is the free application from Microsoft where you will build your reports. If you don't have it yet, you can download it directly from the Microsoft Store on your Windows computer.
• Your Data: Have access to the file (like an Excel or CSV file), database, or online service you want to pull data from. For our examples, having a sample Excel file ready will be helpful.

Uploading Data to Power BI: A Step-by-Step Guide

Power BI offers a central place to connect all your data sources through the "Get Data" feature. It’s the starting point for nearly every report you'll build. Let's look at a few of the most frequently used methods.

Method 1: Uploading a Local File (Excel or CSV)

This is by far the most common starting point for many users. Most business data lives in spreadsheets, and Power BI makes uploading them incredibly simple.

Step 1: Open Power BI and Select "Get Data"

Launch Power BI Desktop. On the "Home" tab of the main ribbon at the top, you'll see a prominent button labeled "Get Data." Click this to open a dropdown menu of the most common data sources.

Pro Tip: You can also click the quick-access icons directly on the ribbon for "Excel workbook" or "SQL Server" if that's what you're connecting to.

Step 2: Choose Your File Type

From the dropdown, select "Excel workbook." If you are using a comma-separated values file, you would choose "Text/CSV" instead. A file browser window will pop up.

Step 3: Locate and Open Your File

Navigate to where your file is saved on your computer, select it, and click "Open."

Step 4: Use the Navigator to Select Your Data

After you open the file, a window called the "Navigator" will appear. This window shows you all the objects you can import from your spreadsheet. This usually includes:

• Each individual worksheet in your workbook.
• Any formal Tables you've created within Excel using the "Format as Table" feature.

Click on an item in the list on the left to see a preview of its data on the right. It's highly recommended to use formatted tables in Excel whenever possible, this provides a more structured and reliable data source for Power BI.

Step 5: Load or Transform Your Data

Once you've selected the table or sheet you want by checking the box next to its name, you have two important options at the bottom of the window:

• Load: Click this if your data is already clean, well-structured, and ready for analysis. Power BI will pull the data directly into your report’s data model.
• Transform Data: Click this if your data needs some cleanup. This is the more powerful option and opens the Power Query Editor. Here, you can remove unwanted rows or columns, fix titles, change data types (e.g., text to number), and perform hundreds of other data preparation tasks before it even enters your report.

For beginners, "Load" is fine for simple, clean datasets. But getting comfortable with "Transform Data" is what separates basic users from Power BI pros. Most real-world data is messy, and a few minutes in the Power Query Editor saves hours of frustration later on.

Method 2: Importing Data from a Website

Did you know Power BI can scrape data directly from tables on a website? This is a fantastic feature for pulling in public data, like stock prices, sports statistics, or census data.

Step 1: Get Data from Web

In Power BI Desktop, click "Get Data" and select "Web" from the menu. If you don't see it, click "More..." at the bottom of the dropdown menu to open the full list of data connectors and search for "Web".

Step 2: Enter the URL

A small window will ask for the URL of the webpage you want to get data from. Paste the URL into the text box and click "OK."

Step 3: Select an HTML Table in the Navigator

Power BI will scan the webpage's HTML code for data tables. The Navigator window will then appear, showing a list of all the tables it found. It will even give you a "Web View" tab to see what the website looks like so you can confirm you have the right one. Click on each table to preview the information and select the one you need. Like before, you can then "Load" or "Transform Data."

Method 3: Connecting to an Online Service (Example using SharePoint)

Many businesses store files in cloud services like SharePoint or work with data from SaaS applications. Power BI has built-in connectors for dozens of these services.

Step 1: Find the Specific Connector

Let's say you have an Excel file stored in a SharePoint folder. Click "Get Data" → "More...". Search for "SharePoint Folder." Select "Folder" in the finder pop-up, then select "Connect."

Step 2: Authenticate Your Account

Power BI will prompt you to enter the SharePoint Site URL. After you paste in the URL, you'll likely be asked to sign in with your Microsoft 365 credentials to authorize Power BI to access your files.

Step 3: Browse to Your File

Once connected, you'll see a list of all the files in that location. From here, the process changes slightly. You might see a file browser window where you can navigate to your desired sheet, or more commonly, a table of file metadata. Look for the column named "Content." Click on the "Combine Files" binary icon (it looks a lot like an Excel button next to it). This tells Power BI to pull the data from the file into the Power Query Editor, where you can begin any necessary data transformation or loading tasks, just like you would with the "Combine Files" function in the content column of a local file.

Best Practices for a Smooth Data Upload

Connecting data is the first step, but how you do it matters. Following a few best practices will make your reporting life much easier.

• Clean Your Source Data: Garbage in, garbage out. The cleaner your original data, the less work you have to do in Power BI. Try to format your Excel files as proper tables with headers in the first row and no merged cells or subtotals.
• Use "Transform Data" Generously: Don’t be afraid of the Power Query Editor. More often than not, data needs some massaging. Removing unnecessary columns, filtering out blank rows, or splitting a column into two are common tasks that are best handled here. Each step you take is recorded and repeatable, so when you refresh the data, the same cleaning steps are automatically applied to new rows.
• Understand the Refresh Process: When you upload a file, it's just a snapshot. To keep your report up-to-date, you'll need to hit the "Refresh" button on the Home ribbon every time the original file has been updated. Once you upload your Power BI file into Power BI Service, however, you can set up a scheduled refresh cycle, so that you always have the latest data without having to manually hit refresh every time.
• Think About Storage Mode: Import vs. DirectQuery: For most file uploads, you'll be using "Import" mode. This means Power BI makes a copy of your data and stores it within the .PBIX file. This is super fast for reporting. Some database connections give you a second option, "DirectQuery," which leaves the data in its original place and queries it live with every click you make. This is better for super huge datasets or when you need real-time data. For 90% of users, though, Import is the way to go.

Final Thoughts

Mastering the "Get Data" process is the first, most critical skill in Power BI. Whether you're pulling from a simple CSV or connecting to a complex database, the workflow inside Power BI remains surprisingly consistent, empowering you to bring different pieces of your business together into a single, cohesive view for reporting and analysis.

For marketing and sales teams, the challenge often isn't just getting data from one source, but wrangling it from a dozen different platforms like Google Analytics, Shopify, Facebook Ads, and Salesforce. Manually connecting and rebuilding these reports week after week is a huge time sink. At Graphed, we automate this entire process. We created a platform that connects all your marketing and sales tools with one click, letting you build dashboards and get insights simply by asking questions in plain English instead of building reports manually. You can get straight to the 'what' and 'why' of your data, bypassing the tedious manual reporting drudgery. We designed it not to take the place of data analysis but to simplify it so that your team can make faster, smarter decisions without needing to become data analysts themselves.