After a lot of research, I found that the easiest way to solve this problem was to download an excel add on called - "data explorer"
Using this tool you can import data from a variety of sources - including raw sql databases, csv files, json records etc.
After importing the data, a wizard opens through which you can manipulate data, join tables, hide columns or even perform some logical functions on rows.
One of the greatest things I found there was an option to "right click" the column name, and then choose the option "transform" and then choose "json"
After choosing json, excel will attempt to discover the field names (I found that doesn't work perfectly - if the field names are changing, it will only be consistent with the first 100 records or so)
after transforming the data type accordingly I was able to expand those columns , perform joins, etc.
Great tool and quite fast as well
After that, I used power pivot and power view to create the reports