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

The Power Query window and its elements

This section will introduce you to the Power Query window. You will become familiar with the elements in it, learning how to understand how its different parts function.

As mentioned in previous chapters, Power Query is launched via the Get & Transform group, located in the Data tab of the Excel ribbon. Once you have clicked on Get Data, select the Launch Power Query Editor option from the drop-down list. The Power Query editor will load as a separate window over the Excel 2019 interface:

Figure 3.1 – The Power Query window without any data loaded

Figure 3.1 – The Power Query window without any data loaded

Note

The various methods of accessing Power Query have already been described in previous chapters.

We will cover the following Power Query elements in the upcoming sections:

  • The main ribbon and tabs
  • The navigation pane (the Queries list)
  • Data table preview
  • The Query Settings pane

Along with these elements, we will cover the...