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

Creating a pivot table

Most people have used a pivot table at some point in their work lives to summarize large amounts of data quickly and easily. As a quick example, I have launched Microsoft Excel and opened the PowerQuery.xlsx file, which can be downloaded from GitHub:

Figure 2.1 – Data for a pivot table

Figure 2.1 – Data for a pivot table

As you can see, we have a table with some sales data that includes salespeople from different regions and the products that they have sold. Let's use this data to make a pivot table:

  1. Select/highlight the entire table. After highlighting the table, click on the Insert tab on the ribbon, and then click on Pivot Table.

    Tip

    You can also highlight the table after you have clicked on Pivot Table. Just click on the arrow button at the end of the Table/Range field and click on it again after your selection is complete.

  2. The range is automatically filled in for you. Here, you can choose to have this on a new worksheet or use the existing...