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

The beginnings of M

As we have learned so far, Power Query allows you to connect to data sources, as well as clean, transform, filter and then, finally, publish them. Beyond this, it also allows you to mash up or collate data from multiple sources. The language is called M, as Mashup is the jargon name that it started with.

Power Query has a really good interface that allows most people to use it effectively without doing too much programming. Everything that you create in Power Query is translated into M. Although we have dabbled a bit with M, we have allowed Power Query to do most of the work for us. In Chapter 8, Creating Dashboards with Power Query, we edited M and created our own code when we inserted additional columns. Without M, we would not be able to write more complex queries, transformations, and calculations. There are certain things, such as connecting to web services, that can only be done with custom M code.

The first thing I would like to say is that M is a...