After working with all sorts of Airtable users to get their bases connected to PowerBI, I wanted to provide a quick tutorial to the community in case you might be looking to connect Airtable to PowerBI as well.
There are two ways to connect Airtable to PowerBI
- The Airtable REST API
- Using a service like the one I’m helping with → Sync Inc
I’ll cover both here briefly:
REST API
These instructions pull together information across several posts here and here. Thanks to @Oscar_Diaz for getting this started - hope pulling this into one place can help.
- Retrieve your API key from your Airtable accounts page.
- Retrieve the your Base ID from the Airtable API Docs.
- Generate the API request to pull the data from your desired Airtable base and a specific table. Here is the basic format:
https://api.airtable.com/v0/[BaseID]/[NAME_OF_THE_TABLE]?Api_key=[API_KEY]
- In Power BI, select Get Data and enter the properly formatted URL you just created
- Now, set up pagination so you can pull in more than 100 records. Do so by clicking the “Advanced editor” button and enter the pagination function here.
- Rinse and repeat with each of the tables you want to bring into Airtable.
Sync Inc
- Create a Sync Inc account and connect to your base.
- In PowerBI, add a trusted certificate for your Sync Inc database which you can get from the Sync Inc docs.
- Connect to your Sync Inc Postgres database in PowerBI using the standard Postgres connector.
Once your Airtable data is in PowerBI, you can create metrics and dashboards with just a couple clicks. It’s a great service for pulling insights out of your Airtable base, combining them with other data sources, and sharing the data with your team.
