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

In this chapter, we went through the theory relating to the different storage modes and dataset types available in Power BI. Overall, we saw how to automate reports using the modes in Power Query and why it is done.

We also learned how to view the storage mode and choose various settings to manage how Power BI caches table data. We investigated the three types under the Storage mode setting—namely, Import, DirectQuery, and Dual. We also looked at how Power BI stores its data and where to locate Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services to understand how Power BI keeps its models in memory. In the last section, we learned about the various Power BI refresh types, including the Import, LiveConnect/DirectQuery, and OneDrive refresh modes. We also learned how to use the Scheduled refresh option to have control over when data is refreshed. Finally, we learned how to connect a report to OneDrive and refresh the connection by synchronizing the dataset, and then we introduced...