Everything You Need to Know About Excel Power Query
Do you want to know what is Excel Power Query? In that case, you’re in the right place. Power Query helps you perform common data tasks easily.
Usually, people spend a lot of time doing repetitive manual tasks such as combining columns, cutting and pasting, and applying filters. With the assistance of the Power Query tool, executing such tasks becomes a whole lot easier.
If you compare Power Query with other BI tools, ease of use is one feature that sets it apart. Its interface looks much like MS Excel, and for this reason, users find it comfortable to work on it.
What Is Excel Power Query?
Power Query, which is also known as Get & Transform in Excel, lets import external data or connect to it. Tasks you can perform on this data include removing a column, merging tables, and changing a data type.
It’s also possible to create charts and reports by loading the query into Excel. To keep the data up to date, you need to refresh the data at a regular interval. If you use Excel, Power Query is available to you on three different types of applications: Windows, macOS, and web.
Note: To run Excel Power Query on Windows, you need to have the .NET framework of version 4.7.2 or later. If you don’t have it, you can download it from online.
The Phases of Power Query
In this section, let’s talk about the four parts of this query.
1. Connect
With the help of Power Query, you can transfer data from a single platform like an Excel workbook, or multiple feeds, databases, or services all over the cloud. After importing, you can refresh to get functions like addition and subtraction.
2. Transform
It means modifying data in a way that would meet your requirements related to data analysis. This process of applying transformations to data sets is also known as shaping data.
3. Combine
Combination of multiple queries is possible in the Excel workbook by merging or appending. You can perform these operations in any query independent of the data sources and with a tabular shape.
4. Load
You can take any of the two routes to load queries into the Excel workbook. You can either use the Close and Load commands from the Power Query Editor or right-click a query and use the Load to option from the Excel Workbook Queries pane.
How to Enable Excel Power Query?
If you use Excel 2010 and 2013, Power Query is available as a free add-in. You can easily download it from the official website of Microsoft. While downloading, don’t forget to choose the download option suitable for your OS.
Since Excel 2016, Power Query is available as a built-in tool. Select the Data Tab of Excel and go to the Get & Transforms Data section to get it.
Conclusion
In this article, users learned about Power Query and how it helps you perform mundane regular tasks easily. Here, the different phases of Excel Power Query and ways of enabling it were also discussed.
Now that you know the basics, you can save valuable time by performing various functions in a few clicks.
You may also be interested in how to refresh a Pivot Table in Excel.
