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 9: Working with M

In this chapter, we will be introduced to the Power Query M language and how to use and write the syntax, including the steps to reveal a list of functions and definitions.

This chapter will look at the structure and syntax of M. All programming languages have their own specific syntax and structure, and once you master the structure of M, it becomes easier to understand. We will look at the main data types and functions and provide a walk-through demonstration of how to use each of these data types. Some of the text data types that we will cover include numeric data types, lists, records, tables, searches, and shares, before looking at how to import a .csv file using M.

In this chapter, we will cover the following main topics:

  • The beginnings of M
  • Understanding the M syntax and learning how to write M
  • Using #shared to return library functions, including function definitions, without having an internet connection or connecting to an...