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 10: Examples of M Usage

This chapter concentrates on a few examples of M usage, including the concatenate function. We will first compare the difference between formulas in Excel and Power BI, before looking at the ampersand operator (&) and how it can be used. We will go through an example of how you can do this by using a simple name and surname concatenation formula.

We will examine how Text.From and Text.Combine can be used to join and concatenate different strings, dates, and columns. We will also learn how to set up our own SQL server legally and for free to use for non-commercial purposes; it will have full functionality. In doing this, we will also cover how to import the AdventureWorks databases into SQL to use them as a resource.

Lastly, this chapter concentrates on parameters and how they can be used effectively to filter data sources, adding parameters to control statements that allow us to filter them according to different dates. We will continue by...