Introduction to Power Query
Hi Friends, we are starting with a new series of articles on a very important feature of MS Excel. Yes, that is Power Query. It was first introduced with Excel 2010 version and started gaining attention of users due to its capabilities and features. So, what is Power Query, let’s start from this question.
What is Power Query?
Power Query is a business intelligence tool available in Excel and Power BI that allows you to import data from many different sources and then transform and analyze the data.
Through Power Query you can setup a query once and reuse it with a single click refresh button. As the businesses are growing so as the data is also increasing day by day. Power Query is a powerful feature which can import thousands and millions of records into the data model for analysis.
The user interface is also very intuitive and does not require special skill to learn it. With the easy navigation, you can quickly import your data and start analyzing in few minutes only.
So what you can do with your data through Power Query. Well the answer is Almost Everything. It allows multiple ways to import the data then transform it using cleanup, filters, sort etc. and finally Publish or export the data.
How to use Power Query?
Using Power Query, you can import data from various source such as Excel, Text, Access, SQL, Web, Facebook, Azure and many more.
Once you have imported the data, the next step is to clean and transform it. You can do it through the amazing features provided by Power Query such as changing data types, removing columns rows, blanks, find and replace, text to column, split column, sum, rounding, calculations, filters, sort, transpose etc.
If you have multiple data sets that you want to consolidate into one query, then you can use append or merger queries feature.
The next step is to summarize your data through Group By option.
The final step is to publish or export your data to Excel file. You can do this through “Close & Load” button and your data is ready to share.
There are majorly two advantages of Power Queries as mentioned below
- No changes to your Source Data: Power Query does not make changes to your data source, it simply makes connection to your data source and reads the data. So you can rest assured that your data will not be changed by Power Query.
- Re-usability: You can create your Power Query with one data set and run it with another data set without making much changes. This saves time in avoiding rework due to data change.
Very clear explanations.. Thanks.. Need more videos on PQ…