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

Summary

Throughout this chapter, we have concentrated on more advanced functions, using IF; creating parameter tables and, my personal favorite, using Index and Modulo functions; and lastly, appending files and tabs.

We have seen that when using the IF statement, it was relatively similar to Excel, but when we used the nested IF statement when deciding on whether something was to be picked up in the store or to be delivered the OR command became very important. The parameter tables are great if you are using the same template every month and all you want to do is change the data source from one file to another. Changing the table in Excel allows you to update the data source without leaving Excel and going into Power Query Editor, which saves you time. Next, we saw that the Index and Modulo functions are really useful when you have an Excel document that does not have the correct formatting or perhaps has data that is not even in columns. Using these functions allows you to take...