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Quick Tip - Connecting to a SharePoint Folder in Power BI

Quick Tip - Connecting to a SharePoint Folder in Power BI

 

Recently, when teaching the Advanced Power BI Course by Pragmatic Works, I had a student ask how to use the SharePoint Folder in Power BI. She had been struggling with getting it to work correctly. After trying a few different URLs, I could see why she was having a problem. Since you’re reading this, you are probably having the same kind of issues. The error message is actually pretty good, but a little confusing. When the error says “the site’s root URL only” I took this to mean SharePoint’s URL, however, it actually means the URL of the site within SharePoint.

The URL isn’t valid. Please enter the site’s root URL only.

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Let’s take a look at how you can properly connect to a SharePoint Folder in Power BI and extract the files.

Connecting to a SharePoint Folder in Power BI

In my first attempt I tried connecting to simply the root of my SharePoint site.

https://pragmaticworksonline.sharepoint.com

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This only allowed access to the Shared Documents folder on the root and therefore didn’t work.

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As you can see in the above image, this only allowed access to the Shared Documents folder on the root of the SharePoint site.

Connecting to a specific SharePoint site

Next, I tried connecting directly to the root of a particular site. I connected to the training site on SharePoint using the following URL:

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This worked, the SharePoint folder option will traverse subfolders, just like the default from folder option. Therefore, if you are looking for a particular directory then you can simply apply a filter in the Power Query Editor on the Folder Path property.

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