Using Power Query to tell your story form your Facebook Data.
Most of the time of this weekend, I spent my time to extract the story behind my Facebook data by using Power Query. Power Query can connect data across a wide variety of sources, where facebook is one of the data source. By using Power Query you can extract your facebook data easily and do analysis your own story by using your own facebook data.
Talking about Power Query: Microsoft Power Query for Excel is an Excel add-in that enhances the self-service Business Intelligence experience in Excel by simplifying data discovery, access and collaboration.
Microsoft Power Query for Excel, is a new add-in that provides a seamless experience for data discovery, data transformation and enrichment for Information Workers, BI professionals and other Excel users. With Power Query you can:
- Identify the data you care about from the sources you work with (e.g. relational databases, Excel, text and XML files, OData feeds, web pages, Hadoop HDFS, Facebook Data etc.).
- Discover relevant data from inside(*) and outside your organization using the search capabilities within Excel.
- Combine data from multiple, disparate data sources and shape it in order to prepare the data for further analysis in tools like Excel and Power Pivot, or visualization in tools like Power View and Power Map.
You can easily download from the link below:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=39379
You can find more about Power View, Power Map, Power BI and Q&A from the official Microsoft Power BI site. http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/powerBI/default.aspx
Now, I think you have installed Power Query add-in in Excel 2013 professional edition,
So, let’s drill into your Facebook data to extract your story .!!!
Firstly you need to open Excel sheet and go to the Power Query ribbon bar in Excel, then go to the ‘From Other Source’ section where you will see the ‘From Facebook option’ from dropdown list.
Due to the so many slides or pages, the detail step by Step guide have uploaded into my Slideshare account. You can download or go through the section in order to know how to use Power Query and how to extract your Facebook Data and how to do analysis using Power View to tell the story. Here is the Slideshare:
Slideshare link: http://www.slideshare.net/anil_maharjan/using-power-query-to-tell-your-story-form-your-facebook-data
Where I have use Power View to analyse the facebook data and give us some story to view.
Here I have used three Power Query Analysis, I think you will find these easy after you once go through the slides in above link where I have listed detail step by step method to do these analysis or if you have some knowledge of Power View then it must be quite easy to do analysis.
Power Query Analysis 1 using Power View:
- Let’s see when you have added your friends.
- Through this analysis you can find out the total friends added in facebook, in which year, month.
- First and recent friends connected within facebook.
- You can know when you are connected with which friend.
Happy to see the results. 🙂
Now you want to know first and recent friends connected within Facebook along with which time they have added . You can get it by using period field in Tile By and story field in rows with friend added filter field in column . This shows the first friends that you have added in facebook. Happy to see the result. 🙂
If you need to find out the recent added friends in Facebook then just click the last period.
Here as per chart I can clearly see that I have added a lot of friends in 2009 and 2010. Since that is the year when I had completed my computer engineering course and most of my time I was spending in facebook. Quite amazing it does remind my past college life. Power Query along with Power View actually can tell us story of our own. Happy to find out my past.
This is such a cool tool, Power Query and Power View along with Power BI, You can visualize the things you just want to see.
Power Query Analysis 2 using Power View:
- Ø Now, let’s see how many of your friends are male and female.
I think after going through the slides you will surely know how to get the data from Facebook using Power Query for friend list and how to use Power View to analysis. You can go through detail steps again from slides to do this analysis.
Power Query Analysis 3 using Power View:
- Let’s see your facebook activities from past to present.
This will help you to track down how much time have you spent in facebook and how frequent you post or update your feeds.
This will helps facebook to track down the facebook user usage trend.
- How and when user is spending the time in facebook.
- Why the facebook user usage trend is decreasing or increasing.
- What is the reason behind the feeds data of user is decreasing or increasing.
For the facebook activities analysis, you can use the same feed information worksheet and by creating new Power View and line chart option you can start analysis of facebook activities from different perspective.
From graph we can clearly see that there is a huge spike in 200907 to somewhat up to 201003 this is still because this is the time when I had completed my computer engineering course and most of my time I was spending in facebook.
Also, going on next year in 201109 there is another spike which is due to that month is my birthday on 04thSeptember, where there is more feeds regarding my birthday wishes.
Now, let’s see the current year facebook activates by using similar Power View and same drag and drop features and by scroll down to last month date 201405 you can see the trend of your current facebook activities.
Here from line trend analysis it seems that the facebook activates from past year to current is frequently decreasing in my case. This is due to that I am spending less time in facebook as compares to previous year where I use to spend most of my time.
Reference:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/powerBI/default.aspx
http://www.slideshare.net/murrayfife/using-microsoft-power-query-to-analyze-facebook-data
SUMMARY:
Power Query along with Power View actually can tell us story of your own. This is how Power Query along with Power View can tell your story by using your own facebook data. Happy to find out my past.
Quite amazing it does remind my past college life.
This is such a cool tool, Power Query and Power View along with Power BI, You can visualize the things you just want to see.
Also, I am thinking that if facebook provides our friends location data then it will be so easy to find out the friends and family around the world. Where Power Map will be more useful to track down the friends whom we have no idea where she or he is but we do connected with facebook in virtual world. If we can think of creating facebook friends and family location track app which will helps us to find out where exact is our friends and family are located based on the current location information of facebook data.
Thanks,
Anil Maharjan