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

Exploring data source settings

Once you have the connections to the data, it is possible to edit the credentials for each connection you have used, not just for the active connection, but for all the connections that you have made. This means that if your data source is located in a folder called sales, but now you want the connection to be in a subfolder of sales, you need to be able to change the source settings so that Power Bi/Power Query knows where to look. We will learn how to do this in Excel next.

From Excel

There are different ways in which you can get to the same destination. I have added three here:

  • If you are in Excel and you have loaded the query into a table, then you can click anywhere in the table and select Edit from the Query ribbon. This will open Power Query Editor:
Figure 4.48 – Query ribbon

Figure 4.48 – Query ribbon

  • Alternatively, you can right-click the query in the Queries & Connections window and select Edit, which will...