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MFester's avatar
MFester
Frequent Visitor
7 years ago

PDF data automated

Hi all,  Hopefully you can help me.   Each month I receive a PDF where I want to take one table of data into Power BI. I can use the PDF converter and read the data no problem, but I have two...
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v-jiascu-msft's avatar
v-jiascu-msft
Microsoft Employee
7 years ago

Hi MFester,

 

What did you mean "get them into the same datasource instead of multiple"?

Maybe you can name the file with dates and then use the Folder connector.

 

Best Regards,

MFester's avatar
MFester
Frequent Visitor
7 years ago

Thanks again for helping me.

 

Maybe I still can't explain myself very well.

 

The table in PDF is like this

 

               Sales          Customers           Employess

North      411               etc

South     564

East        7965

West      7984

 

next month I get a new PDF with the same figures in.

 

What I want to do is to be able to see a graph of for example sales over time - compare different months to each other and so on.

 

If I load in the tables one after the other I get multiple sources, but I cant seem to get them to work together, so that I can do that.

 

I have recently made the shift to PowerBI from Tableau and in Tableau I would have merged the data, but I dont know if PowerBI can do that and if so, how?


Perhaps there is a better way, that I dont know.

 

Hopefully it's a better explanations.


Thank you in advance for your help and patience :)

 

Kind Regards

  • v-jiascu-msft's avatar
    v-jiascu-msft
    Microsoft Employee
    7 years ago

    Hi MFester,

     

    Power BI has the exact feature. Please refer to the gif animation below. We can combine the source file, PDF here, into a single query. We can get the new data by refreshing the query when new data has been added. I would suggest you name the files with dates. Then we can extract it as the date column.

    pdf-data

     

    Best Regards,

    • MFester's avatar
      MFester
      Frequent Visitor
      7 years ago

      When I follow your steps it gives me an error.

       

      "COMBINE FILES

       

      We didnt't recognize the format of your first file (112018.pdf). Please filter the list of files so it contains only supported types (Text, CSV, Excel workbooks, etc.) and try again"

       

      What can I do about that?

       

      Because looking at the gif, that's exactly what I want.

      • v-jiascu-msft's avatar
        v-jiascu-msft
        Microsoft Employee
        7 years ago

        Hi MFester,

         

        I would suggest you upgrade your Desktop first. It's version: 2.65.5313.1381 (December 2018) now.

        Can you import 112018.pdf using PDF connector?

         

         

        Best Regards,