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

Connecting from a relational database

To study an example of connecting from a relational database, I am going to get data from a relational database that uses Structured Query Language (SQL). Although this might seem harder to do than any of the other things we've done thus far, it is very similar, and the hardest thing to do is type your password correctly for the authentication process.  

There are different ways to connect to a SQL database; that is, either through Excel's Get & Transform tool or through Power BI.

We'll try each of these options in the following sections.

Connecting through Excel's Get & Transform tool

To connect to a SQL database, perform the following steps:

  1. Launch Excel.
  2. Click on the Data ribbon | Get Data | From Database | From SQL Server Database.

At this point, it is pertinent to say that there are huge numbers of databases that you can connect to, as well as to Azure directly, but you can...