How To Pull/Scrape Data From A Website Into Power BI (used AbokiFX as an example)

Power BI is an amazing tool. I have used it to create amazing auto-updating dashboards for different reporting needs. You can view a couple that I made publicly available: https://www.nigerianelite.com/Shares/Analysis, https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Data-Stories-Gallery/Sales-Dashboard-for-a-Pizza-Restaurant/m-p/509025#M2208 and https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Data-Stories-Gallery/Nigerian-Stocks-Market-Analysis-Live-Report/m-p/175769#M850

Today, however, I will be showing you how to use Power BI to scrape data from a website and create a report/dashboard from the scrapped data. I will illustrate with AbokiFX.com data on parallel market FX rates for Nigeria. Effectively, you will be creating a report like the one below:

You can view the interactive version at https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Data-Stories-Gallery/Nigeria-Parallel-black-Market-FX-Rates-from-Abokifx-com/m-p/568355#M2372 and you can download the editable source file at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1emrcWqpSnBaiYntrvV9ecnUYEcVJ9I3i/view?usp=sharing 

STEP 1

From an empty Power BI desktop file, do Get Data and pick from Web (under Other).

Follow through with providing the URL of the website to pick data from and selecting the table of data to pull into Power BI.

STEP 2

Do a couple of transformation on the data (except you are very lucky that the pulled data is already in a form that suits your report).

STEP 3

Create the report you want and publish.

You may also want to configure a scheduled refresh to make Power BI keep pulling new data from the website everyday.