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 basic power query

In the topics we have covered so far, you learned a lot about the Power Query interface and mastered a number of layout techniques and tips. We will now go through the steps to create a basic power query using an Excel data table from scratch.

First, you need to determine where your data is coming from. For this example, we are going to use the workbook called MattsWinery.xlsx:

  1. Once you have opened the workbook, press Ctrl + T to launch the Create Table dialog box for the Excel data (alternatively, use the Table/Range icon in the Get & Transform group):
    Figure 3.40 – Creating a data table

    Figure 3.40 – Creating a data table

  2. Check that the range selected is the range that you need to use to transform your data.
  3. Just under the selected range, check that the My table has headers checkbox is selected so that Excel identifies the top row as the header row.
  4. Click on the OK button to change the worksheet data into a table and launch the Power Query window. The Power...