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

Writing an IF function in Power Query

Although writing an IF function might appear very different from the way that you normally write a formula in Excel, once you master it, it does get pretty easy. You might even find it easier than writing the formula in Excel.

Refer to the following screenshot of the spreadsheet:

Figure 6.1 – Basic spreadsheet before editing

Figure 6.1 – Basic spreadsheet before editing

In this example, we are going to pretend that we have a spreadsheet and we would like to work out whether the placed order has been delivered. When looking at the spreadsheet, we currently do not have a place for this column and although we could add it in Excel straight away, I am going to do this in Power Query. One of the reasons for doing this is that this sheet might be a template from the company and we would have to add the column every time we wanted to do the query. By adding it in Power Query, it will automatically do this to any additional query with the same template.

We...