Do you want to connect your data from Google Drive to Power BI? If yes, then you are in the right place. Google Drive offers a range of popular tools that are being used by students and professionals alike today.
These tools often used to present data in different formats and can be enhanced even more with integration to BI tools, like Power BI for analytics. This article deals with presenting the highlights of these tools and mentions steps to connect Power BI to Google Drive.
Table of Contents
Introduction to Google Drive
Google Drive offers cloud-based tools to store, share, and access files from any mobile location. For individual use, Drive offers 15 GB of free storage. Due to ease of access and a robust platform in use, Google Drive tools such as Documents, Spreadsheets, and other tools are being used by businesses increasingly for their data requirements.
There are some salient features of Google Drive that helps data manipulation, storage, and sharing, highly convenient. You can backup essential files with multiple users, so no loss takes place during the drafting process.
Large files can be easily shared with co-workers and can be easily accessed using the Google Drive App through any device. It integrates a variety of interesting features like optical character recognition and voice typing, which are helpful for efficient documentation. You can open and edit various kinds of documents, and also integrate with other tools and platforms to be able to access more data representations and several integrations.
Introduction to Power BI
Power BI is a comprehensive collection of services, connectors, and applications that can help channel unrelated data sources into interactive, cohesive, and visually appealing insights. It is a tool that is increasingly used by organizations to represent interactive insights on their data.
Image source: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/desktop/
Key Features of Power BI
Power BI is a Microsoft integration which can be used in collaboration with Google Drive to offer a robust collection of features:
- It enables us to represent analytics minutely for reference by members at every level in an organization.
- You can access self-service analytics at an enterprise scale to reduce any extra costs, and security hazards, as well as scales from individuals to organizations.
- It offers high levels of data sensitivity and prevents data loss to keep your data secure during exports.
- With Power BI, you can gain meaningful insights with a variety of visualizations, built-in AI features, and custom data connections.
- With a range of attractive visualizations and customizable dashboards, comprehensive reports can be drafted.
- The tool helps to transform the existing data model to create charts, graphs, and access visuals of the data for analysis.
Power BI offers an option to navigate through the data stored and organized through Google Drive to draft informative reports for analyzing different aspects of the business.
Hevo is a No-code Data Pipeline that can enable easy data transfers and collaborations. Hevo offers pre-built integrations from 100+ data sources. With a secure data transfer interface, it also presents a variety of additional capabilities, which can make your life easier.
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Some unbeatable features of Hevo are:
- Real-Time: Real-time detection and update of source alteration help prevent inconsistencies. You also get notifications in real-time on the go, which makes tracking activity a breeze.
- Fully Automated: After a one-time setup, automatic data update and management gets enabled. Once configured, it can automatically load data.
- Pre-Built Integrations: Google Drive is not the only data source that is supported. 100+ data sources are compatible, making it a robust platform to use.
- Data Transformation: Many advanced data transformation features are also available, which is very useful when dealing with complex databases as it can help bring out the parts of the data that we truly care about, and allows for cleaner processing.
- Secure: Hevo offers fault-tolerant architecture and makes sure your data is safe.
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Steps to Connect Google Drive to Power BI
The following steps can be followed to set up Power BI Google Drive connection:
- Start by specifying your connection in an OCBC DSN. All Google APIs can be integrated on behalf of either an individual or an organization, as per your requirement.
- Once the DSN has been created, you can proceed with connecting the Google Drive DSN from the Power BI system. You can download the Power BI Desktop from here by clicking on “Download” and then “Power BI Desktop”.
- You need to open Power BI Desktop and click on “Get Data”.
- Select the ODBC option in the panel.
- From the menu, select the concerned DSN. You can also expand the “Advanced Options” and use SQL queries that you want to use to import data.
- In the navigator dialog box, select “tables”.
- You can edit the query of the imported table in the “Query Editor”. Here, you can connect your Google Drive data with other data sources for collaborative manipulation.
- Click on “Load” to pull data into Power BI Google Drive folder and carry out any data executions as required.
After setting up your Power BI Google Drive connector, you can visualize it according to your need in Power BI.
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Limitations
Even though a step-wise procedure can enable a manual connection of Google Drive to Power BI, there are significant challenges that can be encountered with future updates and alterations.
You might need to set a refresh on schedule or even execute manual refreshes as per demand for data to be kept consistent with the source updates. It can be a cumbersome process for large organizations where thousands of updates are being made by the second, and a manual monitoring process seems to be unfavorable.
Automated tools can be used to make this ‘Power BI get data from Google Drive’ process easier to use, especially by those who lack a technical understanding.
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Conclusion
In this blog, you learned about Google Drive, Power BI, and steps to connect Google Drive to Power BI. Power BI offers ODBC connectors to connect to almost all the data sources. You can connect your Google Drive using this connector and then visualize it conveniently in Power BI. But, if you want to integrate data from multiple sources before you opt for analysis, you can use Hevo.
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Hevo is a No-code Data Pipeline. It integrates data from multiple sources before you analyze it in Power BI. The Hevo facilitation is robust, efficient, secure, and reliable. Give Hevo a try by signing up for a 14-day free trial today. You can now transfer data from sources like Google Drive to your target destination for Free using Hevo!
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Share your experience of connecting Google Drive to Power BI in the comment section below.
Driven by a problem-solving approach and guided by analytical thinking, Aman loves to help data practitioners solve problems related to data integration and analysis through his extensively researched content pieces.