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

Using parameters

In this section, we will look at the Power BI Desktop query parameters, which provide a kind of way in which we can filter data. There were some developments and updates made to Power BI Desktop in 2016 that improved the ability to create parameters and use them in various ways. The most common ways that we can reference parameters are through data sources, filter rows, keep rows, and remove and replace rows. It is also possible to load the parameters into the data model so that we can reference them from measures, calculated columns, tables, and reports.

Parameterizing a data source

In this section, we will look at how we can connect different data sources that have been defined in query parameters to load different columns or connections to data sources. One of the great things is that certain pieces of software, such as Salesforce objects, SharePoint, and Power BI Desktop, allow you to use parameters when defining your connection properties. This means that...