Power BI and Tableau both read Reviewflowz through their OData connector. You create a Data Sync connection in Reviewflowz, paste its feed URL and token into the tool, and your reviews load as tables you can chart. The report refreshes from live data, so you never re-export a file.
The feed carries Google reviews and every other platform on your account. It comes from Reviewflowz Data Sync, which needs the Premium plan. If you only need a file once, export your Google reviews to Excel instead.
What you need before you start
Three things have to be in place, and the first one decides everything else.
The Premium plan. Data Sync is part of API access, which Premium includes. A Pro account and a free trial see an upgrade prompt on the Data Sync tab, and a feed request from an account without API access answers "API access is not available on your plan".
A seat on the account. The connection belongs to the member who creates it.
Power BI Desktop or Tableau Desktop.
Create the connection in Reviewflowz
Open Integrations, then the Data Sync tab, and click + Add a new data sync. On an account with no connection yet, the button reads Create your first BI connection.
Each connection is one card. You set four things on it, and every change saves as you make it.
Name. Click the title and rename it. "Data sync" is the default.
Syncs. Pick which listings the connection can read. On an account billed by location you pick locations instead, and the default reads "Any locations". Leave it on the default and the connection reads everything you can see.
To. Pick Power BI or Tableau. The card shows that tool's steps.
The three values. The card lists a Feed URL, a Username and a Password. The Username is your token. The Password stays empty.
The feed URL ends in /api/odata/v1/accounts/ followed by your account number. Every connection on the account shares that URL, and the token is what tells them apart.
Treat the token like a password. Anyone who holds it reads the listings you picked on that card. It also never reaches further than you do: if your member access is limited to some listings, the feed stops at those listings too. To cut a connection off, click Revoke at the bottom of its card. Any report using it stops refreshing.
Connect Power BI
Power BI Desktop calls the connector OData feed. The five steps are the same ones the card shows.
On the Home ribbon, click Get data, then More...
Search for OData feed, select it and click Connect.
Paste the feed URL and click OK.
Choose Basic authentication. Paste the token as the user name, leave the password blank and click Connect.
Pick the tables you want in the Navigator and click Load.
Once the report is published, set a refresh schedule in Power BI so it pulls new reviews on its own.
Connect Tableau
Tableau Desktop reaches the feed through its OData connection.
Choose Connect, then To a Server, then OData.
Paste the feed URL into the Server field.
Set Authentication to Username and Password. Paste the token as the username and leave the password blank.
Click Sign In, then drag a table onto the canvas.
On a large account, build the workbook on an extract instead of a live connection, and schedule the extract refresh. The feed sends 1,000 rows per page and the tool follows the pages for you.
Which tables you get
The feed has six tables. Reviews is the one most reports start from, and the others join to it on the review profile.
Table | What a row is |
Reviews | One review, with its rating, date, platform, reviewer, text, reply, tags, link and language |
ReviewProfiles | One listing, with its platform, URL and location |
Locations | One location, with its address, country, category, latitude and longitude |
RatingsHistory | One day of the rating and review count a platform reports for a listing |
ReviewSummary | One month per listing, with the review count, the average score and the count at each star level |
ReviewChanges | One change to a review (added, changed or deleted), for refreshes that only reload what changed |
Three details save you a wrong chart.
Filter Reviews on IsLive. IsLive is true for the current version of a review that has not been removed. It is never empty, so a filter on it keeps the rows you expect.
RatingsHistory is the platform's own number. The total is an all-time figure, so adding it up across days gives a number far too large. ReviewSummary is built from the reviews Reviewflowz holds, so the two tables will not always agree.
Custom dimensions arrive as columns. Each custom dimension on your account becomes a column on Reviews, named in the same style as the rest.
If the tool shows an error
The tools show the feed's message as it is, so the text tells you which of three things to fix.
Message | What to do |
Invalid or revoked token | Copy the token from the card again. If the connection was revoked, create a new card. |
API access is not available on your plan | The account is not on Premium. |
You are not authorized to perform this action | The account number in the feed URL is not the account the token belongs to. Copy the URL from the card again. |
The card also tells you what the tool has done. It shows Never synced until the first refresh, Syncing now while one runs, and Last synced once one has finished.
Use the same feed somewhere else
Excel, Qlik Sense and Domo read the same feed, and the card has a button for each. Looker Studio has no built-in OData connector, so the way there is a Looker Studio dashboard built from your Google reviews. To keep a spreadsheet current instead, use the live Google Sheets sync.
Data Sync is part of the Premium plan. Each connection is a token you can revoke, scoped to the listings you pick and to what your member access can see, and the report reloads from live reviews instead of from a file exported last month. Here is how Google reviews load into Tableau.