Why this is in my collection
From the publisher:
Power Query is one component of the Power BI (Business Intelligence) product from Microsoft, and “M” is the name of the programming language created by it. As more business intelligence pros begin using Power Pivot, they find that they do not have the Excel skills to clean the data in Excel; Power Query solves this problem. This book shows how to use the Power Query tool to get difficult data sets into both Excel and Power Pivot, and is solely devoted to Power Query dashboarding and reporting.
Highlights
- Recorded steps replace one-off heroics — Power Query captures every transformation as an inspectable, ordered, repeatable step; Puls and Escobar turn ad-hoc Excel cleanup magic into a declared pipeline, the analyst's first encounter with transformation-as-code.
- Build once, refresh forever — the shift from redoing the cleanup every month to pressing refresh is the automation dividend of structure, experienced at desktop scale; the smallest possible proof of the MDDE economics.
- The GUI is a code generator — every click writes M underneath, and the book deliberately lifts the hood on that language; a mainstream, million-user example of the thesis that tools should generate the code from a higher-level expression of intent.
- Reshape data to the model the analysis needs — unpivoting human-formatted layouts into tall, machine-friendly tables is the book's signature move; the recognition that data has a correct structural form independent of how someone happened to type it.
- Parameterize instead of duplicate — reusable queries and parameters over copy-pasted variants; pattern thinking arriving in the spreadsheet world, where duplication had always been the default.
- Data preparation deserves its own layer — pulling cleanup out of scattered worksheet formulas into a dedicated, ordered stage; layer discipline for the most anarchic data environment on earth.
Highlights on this page are generated with the help of AI.