How to Connect Confluence to Power BI

Connecting Confluence to Power BI transforms your team’s project documentation from static pages into interactive, data-driven dashboards. Instead of just reading project updates anecdotally, you can visualize progress, track key metrics, and share high-level insights across your organization. This article will walk you through the various methods to link Confluence data to Power BI, from simple manual exports to automated live connections.

Why Bother Connecting Confluence to Power BI?

You might think of Confluence as just a place for meeting minutes, project plans, and knowledge base articles. While it's great for that, it's also a potential goldmine of structured data. By pulling this information into Power BI, you centralize it with your other business data and unlock deeper analysis. Here’s what you can achieve:

• Live Project Dashboards: Turn a table of project tasks on a Confluence page into a dashboard visualizing task status, assignments, and deadlines. Answering "how's the project going?" becomes as simple as looking at a chart.
• Resource Management: Track who is working on what across multiple projects by centralizing data from various Confluence spaces. Identify overloaded team members or spot resource gaps instantly.
• Decision-Making Logs: Analyze key decisions made in meeting notes to track trends and ensure accountability over time.
• Content Performance: For knowledge bases, you can (with the right method) analyze metrics like page views, edits, and comments to see which articles are most effective and which need updates.

Step 1: Get Your Confluence Data Ready for Analysis

Before you even think about Power BI, your data in Confluence needs to be structured properly. Power BI works best with tables, not free-form text. The golden rule is: if you want to report on it, put it in a table.

Let's say you're managing a marketing campaign. Instead of listing updates in a bulleted list, create a table on your Confluence page like this:

Example: Campaign Task Table

A clean, predictable table like this is easily digestible for a tool like Power BI. Ensure your columns have clear headers and the data in each column is consistent (e.g., all dates are in the same format).

Method 1: Manual Export Using Excel or CSV (The Simple Start)

The quickest way to get data from a Confluence page into Power BI is with a manual export. This method is great for one-off reports but requires manual work every time you want to refresh the data.

Heads Up: Confluence doesn't have a direct "Export table to CSV" button. The most common workaround is to export to Word or copy-paste into a spreadsheet.

Step-by-Step Instructions:

1. Export from Confluence: Navigate to the Confluence page with your data table. Click the three dots (…) in the top right corner and select Export to Word.
2. Copy to a Spreadsheet: Open the downloaded Word document. Select and copy the entire table. Open a new Excel or Google Sheets file and paste the table.
3. Clean Your Data: This is the most important step. When you paste from Confluence, extra text, formatting oddities, or blank rows can come along with it. Take a few minutes to clean it up:
4. Save the File: Save your cleaned-up spreadsheet as an Excel Workbook (.xlsx) or a CSV file (.csv).
5. Import into Power BI:

Your Confluence data is now in Power BI, ready to be visualized! Just remember, if the data changes in Confluence, you'll need to repeat this entire process to see the updates in your report.

Method 2: Using the Confluence API (The Automated Approach)

If you need your dashboard to update automatically, you'll need a more robust solution. This method uses Power BI's built-in Web connector to pull data directly from Confluence's REST API. It's more technical but creates a refreshable link so your reports stay current.

Don't worry if you're not a developer. An API (Application Programming Interface) is just a set of rules that lets different applications talk to each other. We'll use it to have Power BI ask Confluence for the data from a specific page.

Step 1: Generate a Confluence API Token

First, you need to create a secure key for Power BI to use when accessing Confluence. This is safer than using your actual password.

1. In Confluence, click your profile picture in the bottom-left corner and go to Profile. From your profile page choose Settings > Personal access tokens.
2. Click Create token.
3. Give the token a descriptive name (e.g., "PowerBI_Report_Token") and click Create.
4. Important: Copy the token immediately and save it somewhere secure, like a password manager. You will not be able to see it again after you close the window.

Step 2: Find Your Confluence Page ID

The API finds pages using a unique ID, not the title. The easiest way to find it is by viewing the page in Confluence and looking at the URL. It will often look like this:

https://your-company.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/SPACEKEY/pages/123456789/Page+Title

The number is your Page ID. If your URL is different, right-click on the page, select "View Source" or "Inspect Element," and search for "pageId" to find it in the HTML code.

Step 3: Connect Power BI to the API

1. Open Power BI Desktop and click Get Data > Web.
2. In the pop-up, choose the Advanced option.
3. Under URL parts, enter the API endpoint to get your page content. The format is:

https://<YOUR_DOMAIN>.atlassian.net/wiki/rest/api/content/<YOUR_PAGE_ID>?expand=body.storage

Replace <YOUR_DOMAIN> and <YOUR_PAGE_ID> with your actual values. The ?expand=body.storage part tells Confluence to include the page content (the part with our table).

1. Under HTTP request header parameters, you need to add your authentication details. Confluence uses "Basic" authentication for this. Power BI needs this formatted in a specific way. Although it's a bit technical, all you need is:
2. Click OK.

Step 4: Transform the Data in Power Query

Power BI will now load the raw data, which comes in a format called JSON. You just need to tell Power BI how to find the HTML table inside it.

1. The Power Query Editor will open. You'll see one record of data. Click on Record next to the body field.
2. Next, click on Record next to the storage field.
3. Finally, you'll see a field named value. This field contains the full HTML code of your Confluence page!
4. Now, you need to extract the table content from all that HTML. This part requires some text manipulation. Find the "Split Column" feature on the Home or Transform Tabs and search for "<TABLE" and ">TABLE" to isolate your table data code. You will see values in the middle.
5. Once your data has been isolated, promote that first row to the Table Headers, verify your Columns Types of your data, remove unused or blank rows, and click Close and Apply back in Power BI!

This method is powerful because it allows you to schedule a data refresh in Power BI service, keeping your reports automatically up-to-date with any changes in Confluence.

Method 3: Using a Third-Party Connector (The Easiest Live Connection)

If the API method seems too complicated, you're not alone. The easiest and most reliable way to maintain a live connection is by using a specialized third-party tool. Many products listed on the Atlassian Marketplace are built specifically to bridge the gap between Confluence and reporting tools like Power BI.

These connectors typically work in one of two ways:

• As a Confluence App: You install an app in Confluence that generates a secure, shareable link for a specific table on a page. You then paste this link into Power BI using the Web connector, and the app handles all the complex authentication and data parsing for you.
• As a Custom Power BI Connector: Some services provide a file you install in Power BI, which adds Confluence as a new data source under the "Get Data" menu.

While these tools usually come with a subscription fee, they save an enormous amount of time, eliminate the technical hurdles of the API, and offer user-friendly interfaces for selecting exactly which Confluence tables you want to sync.

Final Thoughts

Connecting Confluence to Power BI bridges the gap between collaborative project management and professional business intelligence. Whether you choose a simple manual export for a quick report, the powerful API method for automated updates, or a user-friendly third-party connector, you unlock the ability to turn text-based documentation into a source of clear, actionable insights.

This process of trying to stitch together different data sources is exactly why we built Graphed. Manual exports quickly become stale, and wrestling with APIs takes time away from actual analysis. With Graphed, we simplify all of that. You connect your marketing and sales platforms in seconds, then just use plain English to describe the dashboard you want to see. We automate the entire data connection and visualization process, letting you get straight to the insights without the setup headache.