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

Constructing DAX syntax

Every language you come across will have a syntax and a structure. Syntax refers to all the elements that you use to construct a formula. A formula usually consists of functions. In Chapter 9, Working with M, in the Understanding the M syntax and writing with M section, you learned all about the M syntax. In this topic, you will learn about the DAX table and column name syntax.

It is important to note, especially if you are only just beginning to learn about DAX, that it is broken up into two parts:

Table 12.2 – DAX tools breakdown

Table 12.2 – DAX tools breakdown

You need to understand these tools as you will need to use the correct tool for the DAX code you are using. Often, we search for reference code and copy the code to adapt to our scenarios, so be mindful of this as you will most likely end up with an error and waste time trying to find out why the code does not work.

DAX functions and Excel functions are much the same in terms of behavior...