Part Two: Linking Power BI to Trello (deep dive)

[factgasm]

You have your Trello board. You have access to Power BI. You want to make the two of them talk.

Here we show how to do this utilising the Trello board as a JSON file. (Do not worry if you don’t know what a JSON file is.)

(NB this method describes connection to public Trello boards , if you board is private see: Connecting Private Trello Board to Power BI (without the API))

Getting the top-level table into Power BI

• Make a note of your Trello board’s URL, type “.json” on the end and put it on your clipboard.
  • e.g https://trello.com/b/oBaLsnbq.json
• Now go to Power BI, Get Data and choose Web (NB not JSON):

• Paste the URL and click OK.

• Power BI will say “connecting” for a while but then you should see something like this:

• In the Name box on the right hand side rename the query Trello Parent.
• Now go to File and click Close & Apply:

• This will import the data into Power BI.
• Press save.

At this point we have enough data but the only visualisations we can create are quite boring. See for yourself by dragging the value field on to the report canvas:

The reason it is so boring is that, in the first instance, we can only see top level details. We will now look at dicing into the JSON to get a bit more from our queries.

Next step: Getting Actual Trello Cards into Power BI