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

Creating a basic power pivot and PivotChart

Using dashboards, we can see the data in a visual representation instead of just the figures. This sometimes makes it easier to spot trends and analyze data.

Many times, you will be given data from another person or you will have something that came from an exported CSV file that you need to create reports on. In this first section, we are going to look at pivot tables and PivotCharts and how we can create them.

To start, we are going to create a basic pivot table and a PivotChart to see how this is done. We are going to use our sales data, which shows what has been sold, to whom, and the sales representative who sold it. Refer to the following screenshot:

Figure 8.1 – A basic table

Figure 8.1 – A basic table

We are going to create a pivot table and chart of the salespeople and how much they have sold.

Note

If you are already familiar with how to create these items, then skip to the next section.

Let's see how...