Creating a PowerBI visual from a Whatsapp group

Saturday February 28 2020, I bumped into a post at LinkedIn from Obinna Iheanachor . It was a second post about how to visualize a whatsapp chat into PowerBI. It looked interesting and I wanted to try it out.

Step 1) extracting whatsapp chat data

That was not that difficult, I took a group with data since April 2018 and with 34 members. All members are family of each other.

Step 2) data cleaning and preparation in Python notebook

I need to have the following in Python: pandas, matplotlib, regex, Dateparser and numpy. Mmm I don’t seem to have Dateparser. Let’s see if I’m able to ad this to my python.
Yes while using the Anaconda prompt I managed to install the missing package.
This is a step that took time, because my data was different than the data in the blogpost. I ran into different errors that I needed to solve. It was nice to look into the reason of the error and changing the code in such way, that it fitted my data. I did more than enough reading into the Python documentary.

But I did it, on Tuesday I had a csv-file ready to import into PowerBI

Step 3) data modeling in PowerBI

I started with following the steps and saw my visualizations and thought, this is not really on how I want it.
I went to PowerPoint to create a nice background with a layout and a logo. The charts fitted into the background and I liked the result. This time I cannot share the presentation online, because it is private information about 34 members. But I would like to share that we never forget a birthday, because the two most words are happy birthday.

Step 4) using other data

My son saw the visualizations and he wanted to know how it would look for a WhatsApp group from him. So, he extracted the data and gave the txt file to me.
There was a difference in his and my text file. The date and time where formatted different and I was using that format in the code. That meant I needed to run line by line to check the result of the code and yes, some code needed to be adjusted.
Also, in PowerBI in needed to adjust some of the code that I used by importing the data. I was funny to see, that this group of kids is talking the most about, who can play?