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

Selecting data visualization, a dataset, and an appropriate chart

In the previous section, we have imported all of our data into a Power BI data model. This section deals with how to create an interactive dashboard that will visually show us the data that we can use to analyze the trends.

In Power BI, click on the Report view on the left-hand side, which will bring up a blank working space, which is where we can create our visualizations. On the right-hand side are all the different visualizations that we can use, as in the following screenshot:

Figure 8.29 – The visualizations menu

Figure 8.29 – The visualizations menu

Most of these are self-explanatory, but we will be using a few different ones so that we can learn how they work.

Note

The version of Power BI for Desktop that you're running will determine which of these visualizations you have, and some of the icons might look slightly different from the figures that are displayed here. This is the latest version at...