Book Image

Learn Power Query

By : Linda Foulkes, Warren Sparrow
Book Image

Learn Power Query

By: Linda Foulkes, Warren Sparrow

Overview of this book

<p>Power Query is a data connection technology that allows you to connect, combine, and refine data from multiple sources to meet your business analysis requirements. With this Power Query book, you’ll be empowered to work with a variety of data sources to create interactive reports and dashboards using Excel and Power BI. </p><p>You’ll start by learning how to access Power Query across different versions of Excel and install the Power BI engine. After you've explored Power Pivot, you’ll see why Excel users find it challenging to clean data in Power Pivot and learn how Power Query can help to tackle the problem. The book will show you how to transform data using the Query Editor and write functions in Power Query. A dedicated section will focus on functions such as IF, Index, and Modulo, and creating parameters to alter query paths in a table. You’ll also work with dashboards, get to grips with multi-dimensional reporting, and create automated reports. As you advance, you'll cover the M formula language in Power Query, delve into the basic M syntax, and write the M query language with the help of examples such as loading all library functions offline in Excel and Power BI. Finally, the book will demonstrate the difference between M and DAX and show how results are produced in M. </p><p>By the end of this book, you’ll be ready to create impressive dashboards and multi-dimensional reports in Power Query and turn data into valuable insights.</p>
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Overview of Power Pivot and Power Query
6
Section 2: Power Query Data Transformations
11
Section 3: Learning M

Chapter 8: Creating Dashboards with Power Query

Dashboards are business-intelligent, single-canvas pages that allow the user to tell a story through various visualizations created from table data to highlight important data points for an organization.

The great thing about dashboards is that once they are created, they are completely interactive. They can be viewed from anywhere in the world and, depending on the user's access level, it is possible to edit the data as well. Of course, all the data is live, which means that the millions of rows of data on a dashboard are always up to date and current.

You will find this a very practical and hands-on chapter as if you follow along with the steps, you will create your own interactive dashboard, which you will be able to upload onto the web. In this chapter, some of the skills that you will learn include the following:

  • Uploading files that have a specific file format, even if there are many different file formats in...