ETL & YOU

If you're a nonprofit fundraising data pro, you are working an ETL process in some way, shape, or form on the regular. It's what we've been diving into the past couple weeks in the video walkthroughs 4 Easy Steps to Start Using Microsoft Power BI and Get Data into Power BI.

ETL stands for Extract, Transform, Load. It is a crucial process in Power BI for preparing data for analysis and visualization.

Here's a simplified explanation of each step in the ETL process.

1. Extract
   This step involves extracting data from various sources, like Excel spreadsheets, databases, or web services. Power BI has connectors to many different types of data sources, making it easy to pull in data from wherever it is stored.

2. Transform
   After extracting the data, you'll likely need to transform it (think cleanup) into a format that is more suitable for analysis. This might involve removing duplicate data, cleaning up data that is incomplete or inaccurate, or combining data from multiple sources. Power BI has a wide range of data transformation tools that can help you with this step. You can use the Power Query editor in Power BI to transform and shape the data in a way that is suitable for your analysis.

3. Load
   Finally, you'll load the transformed data into Power BI, where you can use it to create reports, dashboards, and other visualizations. Power BI has a data model that lets you combine and relate data from multiple tables and it automatically optimizes the data for fast querying and visualization.

Your ETL process may differ from this as you are likely performing each of the steps using separate tools. Power BI lets you bring the process under one roof, offering a more streamlined experience.