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 the storage modes and dataset types

Different refresh requirements are available for the storage modes and dataset types within Power BI. To view any sorts of changes that have occurred, you can reimport the data into Power BI, or there is the option to query the data directly at the source.

When using the Power BI Desktop version, you may want to set the storage mode so that you can manage how Power BI Desktop caches your table data in memory for any reporting outputs you create. Let's investigate a few options that would make setting the storage mode an advantage:

  • Look at reducing the refresh times so that you only cache the data that is essential to meet the requirements of your business.
  • The report query performance in Power BI is definitely enhanced by ensuring that data is cached into memory properly. This is especially crucial when users view and access reports when DAX queries are submitted to datasets.
  • When working with a large dataset...