Power Query Cookbook: Use effective and powerful queries in Power BI Desktop and Dataflows to prepare and transform your data

Leverage your source data from hundreds of different connections, perform millions of different transformations, and easily manage highly complex data lifecycles with Power Query

Key Features

• Collect, combine, and transform data using Power Query’s data connectivity and data preparation features
• Overcome the problems faced while accessing data from multiple sources and reshape it to meet your business requirements
• Explore how the M language can be used to write your own customized solutions

Book Description

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.

What you will learn

• Understand how to use Power Query to connect and explore data
• Explore ways to reshape and enrich data
• Discover the potential of Power Query across the Microsoft platform
• Build complex and custom transformations
• Use M code to write new queries against data sources
• Use the Power Query Online tool within Power BI Dataflows
• Implement best practices such as reusing dataflows, optimizing expanding table operations, and field mapping

Who this book is for

This book is for data analysts, BI developers, data engineers, and anyone looking for a desk reference guide to learn how Power Query can be used with different Microsoft products to handle data of varying complexity. Beginner-level knowledge of Power BI and the M Language will help you to get the best out of this book.

Table of Contents

1. Getting Started with Power Query
2. Connecting to Fetch Data
3. Data Exploration in Power Query
4. Reshaping Your Data
5. Combining Queries for Efficiency
6. Optimizing Power Query Performance
7. Leveraging the M Language
8. Adding Value to Your Data
9. Performance Tuning with Power BI Dataflows
10. Implementing Query Diagnostics