For a report I am working on about Los Angeles’ Executive Directive #1, which created middle-class housing across Los Angeles before NIMBYs curtailed it, I want to see if changes to the ED 1, of which there have been two substantive ones, impact the number of submitted projects or their size. ED 1 version 1 required the City Planning department to publish data about use of the program, and those data are available in the ED 1 Case Summary section of the ED 1 Resources page.

They are available as an embedded table created with Microsoft Power BI. I could not build a web scraper to retrieve the data. I am not a scraping expert, but I believe Power BI tables, or at least this one, are designed so that their data cannot be downloaded directly. Microsoft’s support documentation says one could open the table in the Power BI desktop app, but a friend who tried could not. Unwilling to spend the time manually entering the data, I hired a freelancer on Upwork to enter the data for me.

Reviewing the freelancer’s first set of work, I clicked on a row of the ED 1 table. It then occurred to me to right click. Lo and behold, a miracle: the option to copy value or copy selection. Copy value only copies the clicked cell, even if the entire row is highlighted. Copy selection, however, copies the whole row. Even better, it is possible to select multiple rows with ctrl+right-click, meaning the rows only have to be copied once. I could not select a range of rows with shift+click, but the ability to select multiple rows with ctrl is good enough.

I do not know if this functionality is true of all Power BI tables or is specific to how the City Planning department set up the table. I went ahead and paid the freelancer for their entire work since doing so saves me about 30 minutes of work, but I now feel like the money was spent unnecessarily.