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

Summary

Although we can create a pivot table relatively quickly in Excel, there are a few drawbacks that Power Query can solve. One of the biggest problems with Excel is that it can only have just over a million rows of data. The reality of this is that once you start going over a few hundred thousand, Excel becomes a bit sluggish.

Power Pivot allows us to work with huge datasets, which creates smaller and faster workbooks than standard pivot tables. One of the ways Power Pivot makes this more effective is by loading the data into the data model of Excel and not into a worksheet. We are then able to create relationships between the different tables and we do not have to worry about using VLOOKUP to create one table with everything in it.

By creating pivot tables based on this model, we can analyze multiple tables of data more easily and efficiently.

In the next chapter, we will introduce the Power Query interface, create a basic Power Query, and discover how to send data back...