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

Understanding custom connections

There are various ways in which we can connect data to Power BI and Power Query. Some of the most common ones can be found in the Get Data menu on the Home ribbon, but we can load other data that is not as obvious. We are going to load data from the web again, but this time, we will load a CSV file so that you can see that we will have to clean the data before we can use it. Click on the Data tab and select the From Web option, the same way in which we did this earlier. Paste in the following URL, https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Learn-Power-Query/Chapter4-Data/master/SalesData10.csv, and then click OK:

Figure 4.28 – From Web URL

Figure 4.28 – From Web URL

When the data has loaded, Excel is clever enough to know that this is a Comma Delimiter file. If you are connecting to a different type of file, or the Delimiter type is not a comma, you can change this by selecting the appropriate type from the Delimiter drop-down box, as shown here:

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