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

Appending multiple tabs

In this section, we are going to look at how we can append multiple tabs from the same workbook. Although there are different ways in which we can do this, we are going to use M code to append the tables together.

We are going to open a workbook with sample sales data (sample1.xlsx) for different parts of South Africa. Each table is on a separate worksheet in the workbook and each table is the name of the place (Cape Town, Durban, and so on):

  1. To append the different sheets, we will create a new Blank Query by selecting this from From Other Sources in the Data tab.
  2. In the formula bar, I am going to use the =Excel.CurrentWorkbook() formula, which will show me all of the tables in the Excel workbook. Please remember that the formula is case sensitive:
    Figure 6.40 – The show tables formula

    Figure 6.40 – The show tables formula

    Looking at the formula, it tells us to look at the current workbook and then it finds the tables, name ranges, and connections, which are displayed. When...