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

Using Power BI to add data to a data model

This section deals with creating relationships and adding more data, specifically measures and calculated columns, using DAX, which allows us to modify and create additional columns that we will need in the dashboard.

When we look at Power BI with the query that we created from the previous section, we can see the name of our table, SalesData, on the right with all of the different fields:

Figure 8.23 – The NetSales table

Figure 8.23 – The NetSales table

On closer inspection of SalesData, the symbol on the left-hand side of some of the fields means that these are numbers. On the left-hand side of the window, we have the Report, Data, and Model views:

Figure 8.24 – The different views

Figure 8.24 – The different views

When we first opened Power BI, we were in the Report view by default.

If we click on the Model view, we can see the different relationships that we currently have between our tables. At the moment, we currently...