Book Image

Power Query Cookbook

By : Andrea Janicijevic
Book Image

Power Query Cookbook

By: Andrea Janicijevic

Overview of this book

Power Query is a data preparation tool that enables data engineers and business users to connect, reshape, enrich, and transform their data to facilitate relevant business insights and analysis. With Power Query's wide range of features, you can perform no-code transformations and complex M code functions at the same time to get the most out of your data. This Power Query book will help you to connect to data sources, achieve intuitive transformations, and get to grips with preparation practices. Starting with a general overview of Power Query and what it can do, the book advances to cover more complex topics such as M code and performance optimization. You'll learn how to extend these capabilities by gradually stepping away from the Power Query GUI and into the M programming language. Additionally, the book also shows you how to use Power Query Online within Power BI Dataflows. By the end of the book, you'll be able to leverage your source data, understand your data better, and enrich it with a full stack of no-code and custom features that you'll learn to design by yourself for your business requirements.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Using M on existing queries

In the previous recipes, you saw how to change and edit steps by simply opening the Advanced Editor and modifying data types without adding additional steps or changing data sources, without the need of performing steps from scratch. In this recipe, we will see additional possibilities of how to use M code on existing queries and with few steps.

Getting ready

In this recipe, you need to connect to the Azure SQL Database that you can recreate in your environment with the Adventureworks.bacpac file.

How to do it…

Once you open your Power BI Desktop application, you are ready to perform the following steps:

  1. Click on Get Data and click on More…:
    Figure 7.21 – Power BI connectors

    Figure 7.21 – Power BI connectors

  2. Browse to the Azure SQL database connector, select it, and click on Connect:

    Figure 7.22 – Azure SQL database connector

  3. Enter your server and database information, flag Import as Data Connectivity mode, and then click on OK:

    Figure...