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

Installing SQL Server Management Studio

The next step is to connect to the SQL server using Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). Although there are a number of ways to connect and update databases, I find this one of the easiest. You can either click on Install SQL Server Management Tools, shown in figure 10.11, or you can open an internet browser and go to https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/ssms/download-sql-server-management-studio-ssms?view=sql-server-ver15. Download the Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio setup file. It is roughly around 550 MB in size, so depending on your internet speed, it should not take too long. It does take longer to install the software, so you might have to wait approximately 10 minutes:

 Figure 10.15 – The SSMS installation

Figure 10.15 – The SSMS installation

Once the software has finished installing, you will need to restart your computer.

Open SSMS and Connect to the server by typing in the server name of the database that you created...