How to Extract TfL Network Demand PowerBI Data

Open Data
1

Hi,

I am trying to extract the data from the TfL Network Demand which shows Demand by Travel Mode day by day since 2020.
Link: Microsoft Power BI
The website is in PowerBI and I am able to open the data in table view but I am not able to copy any of the data. Is there a way to copy/download this data to an Excel sheet or any format?

Thanks!

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Welcome @Nael

I suspect the point of using PowerBI is to actually keep you from getting to the actual data. :slightly_smiling_face:

There is a PC version of PowerBI - Microsoft Apps - which you can sometimes use with online data sets, but it’s quite hard to understand how to use as the data sources and then summary options are an uphill struggle.

You might be able to FOI the data, of course - Freedom of Information - Transport for London

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Thanks Brian I appreciate the response!
I get what you’re saying about the data not being made available since it’s on powerBI but the data is shown in table format exactly how I want it but you’re not able to copy or download the data. So I am still able to manually copy the data but I was wondering if there’s a quicker way since there’s thousands of entries to copy.
Also FOI might have worked but I need the data asap for my dissertation and I do not think I will get a response soon enough unfortunately

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I used Snipping Tool to capture the first twenty data rows in a jpg file, then used an OCR program, copying the results into an Excel file. I can see that there is an awful lot of data and you would not want to go through that series of processes a hundred times (though that would still beat transcribing each data point). I have no idea how far you could zoom out of the web page before the OCR process was unable to cope. Someone else may have some better ideas on whether what I have done can be turned into an efficient process but I thought I would throw it into the ring.

Of course it would be much much better if some nice person at TfL could just provide you with the data in machine readable form. After all, open data is meant to be about providing data in a form which can easily be reused.

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@Nael

I suspect @mjcarchive is correct - there are plenty of OCR systems out there, so it depends on what OS you are using.

There are free-sample-Cloud version such as https://cloud.google.com/vision which have been useful in the past. Microsoft have a good one too - OCR - Optical Character Recognition - Azure Cognitive Services | Microsoft Learn which would be 100% ironic.

If you’re screen grabbing as @mjcarchive says, I would go for a lossless format (PNG) on as big a monitor as possible. The “Print Screen” key in Windows copies the screen to the clipboard (apart from W11 Moment 3 when it now starts Snipping Tool) but Alt-Print Screen still copies the active apps active window to the clipboard

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If you have Microsoft OneNote, you can paste a picture into that and then right-click on it and select ‘Copy text from picture’ (or words to that effect). As said above, it works better the larger the original image is - if you find it hard to read, so will it. On a Windows box, Win+Shift+S for screen grabbing.
It comes in very handy for certain IT manufacturers’ training courses when they don’t provide Student Guides. :wink:

Simon

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@SJCooper / @Nael

MS also provides PowerToys and you can use Windows+Shift+T Install PowerToys | Microsoft Learn to use the Text Extractor

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I want to thank you all for the help! This is very useful I appreciate it.
Cheers!

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