Before loading your data into Excel Power Query, you will have to prep it first. If you don't already have a data structure in which to store the data you retrieve, you'll have to create a schema for your data tables. Then, for each value in the response, you'll need to identify a predefined datatype (INTEGER, DATETIME, etc.) and build a table that can receive them.

YouTube's documentation should tell you what fields are provided by each endpoint, along with their corresponding datatypes.Complicating things is the fact that the records retrieved from the source may not always be "flat" – some of the objects may actually be lists.

In these cases you'll likely have to create additional tables to capture the unpredictable cardinality in each record.

You can easily get data from the convenient YouTube Analytics API as well as the YouTube Reporting API. This analytics API is great as it allows both content managers and channel owners to easily download custom reports pertaining to their YouTube Analytics data. And the YouTube Reporting API permits you to download complete sets of data in bulk.

The first thing that you have to do is import your data. All you have to do is go to the Data tab and then press the Get Data command. Now choose From File and in the resulting menu choose from Workbook. You will now see a file picker menu, and you can navigate to the MS Excel file with the data that you would like to import.

Once you have selected the file that you want to import, you will be presented with a Navigator window. The window will allow you to select the relevant sheets from your workbook which contains the data you want to import. You can see a preview of the data on the right-hand side when you are selecting the sheets. If your workbook has more than one data sheet, which you wanted to import, you can easily select more than one sheet using the Select multiple items checkbox.

Note that this will create a separate query for each sheet that you have selected. This will save you from going through the first couple of steps individually. You can now either choose to Load your data or Edit it. Keep in mind that if you decide to load the data, then it would load into an Excel Table without any transformations applied. You can also edit the data, and this is where you will be able to apply your data cleaning transformations.

If you've made it this far, congrats! You probably have a written a program or script to extract your data and move it into Excel Power.

Now it's time to think about how you will keep this data up-to-date by loading updated or new data. Of course, you can just replicate all your data every time you have updated your records, but that would be extremely manual and time-consuming.

Luckily there is a better way. The key is building your script so that it can sense incremental updates made to the data.

Thankfully, YouTube API results include fields so that you can identify those records which are new since the last update you made (or since the most recent record you have copied). Once you have taken new data into consideration, you can easily set your script either as a continuous loop or cron job to pull down new data as soon as it appears. And keep in mind that, as with most codes, once you write it, you will need to maintain it.

In case YouTube changes its API, or if the API sends a field containing a data type that your code does not recognize, you might have to change the script.

If all this sounds a bit overwhelming, don't worry -- there is an easier way to get this done!

Thankfully, products like Improvado were developed to move data from YouTube to Excel Power Query automatically. Using Improvado, you can easily combine the most crucial and relevant data from your ad campaign into a dashboard. You can then connect this data to Excel Powe Query.