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

Merging using the concatenate formula

I am always amazed by how many different ways data is exported from a CSV file depending on where it comes from. With student and project management software, how the data was typed in sometimes also makes a difference. A typical way in which a person's name and surname is displayed is SMITH, John. In Excel, it is possible to take this field using the Text to Columns comma-delimited method to split the name and surname into two columns, as shown:

Figure 10.1 – Excel concatenation

Figure 10.1 – Excel concatenation

You can then concatenate the two cells using the appropriate formula, and you can use the Proper function to get the correct case. Of course, this is time-consuming and there is no quick way of doing the first step automatically. The other problem is that if you are doing this with multiple different documents, it is a complete nightmare.

This first section will compare what we have just done in Excel with getting the same result...