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

Introducing Power Pivot

It is important that you understand the term data model (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_modeling) before delving into what Power Pivot is about. A data model is where two or more tables are linked together by a common field or column. If you have already worked with Microsoft Access databases, then you will have an understanding of table relationships. Linking tables from one or more sources to a single data source is known as a data model:

Figure 1.2 – Representation of linked tables

Figure 1.2 – Representation of linked tables

Power Pivot is a part of the Power BI family; it is considered the brain of the family as its purpose is to model, crunch, create calculations, and analyze. Using the analogy of a vehicle, it is the engine in the data model that hosts all of the data. It can digest large sets of data that reside in the multi-table data model it creates and can then be used as a data source, for example, to create pivot tables. When working with data...