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

Data profiling tips

We will learn about the function of the data profiling icons in the View tab in Power Query through Excel and Power BI. We will look at how to display data using monospace fonts, as well as how to add Column Quality, Distribution, and the Profile feature in Power BI and understand what they do. The full set of data profiling options are currently only available through the Power BI desktop. So, why would we use these features? Simply put, we do so to make working in Power Query more visual with a few quick access tools to replace or edit data.

We will be using the SSGProfiling.xlsx workbook for all of the following data profiling examples.

Although data profiling is available in Power Query through Excel, it is not as comprehensive as accessing it through Power BI. We will, therefore, explain all of these options using the Power BI application. For reference, we have included the following screenshot of the View tab of Power Query through Power BI and Excel...