Automate Reporting - No BI Tools Required
All you need is a little python, some APIs and/or a database. 😉
Let’s pretend you work at a company that doesn't’ have the resources quite yet to have a data engineer available to you or have one of the big BI tools (Looker, Tableau, Power BI etc.). You’re a BI analyst who will do whatever it takes to get the job done and you have a lot on your plate. You don’t want to be stuck with all this manual reporting so how do you solve this problem?
One approach is to use python to take data from an api or a database, transform that data and upload it to a google sheet (ETL). That sheet can then be shared across the organization and then further manipulated by the end user and/or visualized. You can even create dynamic charts in google sheets.
This can of course all be done automatically every day and can run on the weekends, when you’re on vacation (like I currently am and no I don’t want to leave Puerto Rico) or when you get another project and don’t have the time to update it yourself. Pretty neat.
I’ll show an example of what that would look like with an api and a database so let’s get started. The full code and dependencies can be found on my github page.
