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

Choosing the Import storage mode setting

So far in this book, we have imported a number of datasets, but we have not really broken down the steps to refine the process as we proceeded through the steps. Let's refresh our memory by looking at the various steps again, but this time highlighting the Import Data option:

  1. Open Power BI Desktop, and then click on Get Data | Excel.
  2. Select the SSGSchool.xlsx file to import.
  3. Choose the tables you wish to import. In this case, we will select the tables we want by clicking on the squares next to each one to select them individually:

    Figure 7.5 – Selecting the tables to import using the checkboxes alongside each element

  4. Click on Load to import the dataset.
  5. You will see the Load screen, where the searched relationships are present, before importing:

    Figure 7.6 – The Load table screen will display once you have clicked on Load

  6. If you were importing any SQL connections, the following screen would appear...