Introduction to Power Query in Excel

Imagine Excel as you've never seen it before – Power Query opens a window to a whole new world of data possibilities! In this chapter, you’ll explore the layout and features of Power Query and its interplay with traditional Excel workbooks. You’ll load data from multiple sources and learn to structure them through column and row manipulations while maintaining an applied steps log of all your actions.

In this chapter, you’ll harness Power Query’s digital cleaning features to prepare a squeaky-clean dataset! Column profiling features will be covered, allowing you to handle errors and missing data effectively. You’ll also master eliminating duplicate data and correcting for data entry issues and outliers.

It’s time to transform! This chapter covers many basic column transformations - a vital step in the journey from raw data to meaningful insights. You will learn how and when to apply numeric, date/time, and text transformations to both transform and derive column contents with Excel Power Query’s many built-in features.

It’s all about shaping and grouping in this final chapter! You will get hands-on experience with powerful transformation options to bring your analysis prep to the next level. You’ll learn how and when to apply transpose, pivot, and group-by transformations - all within the Power Query editor. You’ll also learn how to leverage existing queries to build new ones and track their connection in the Query Dependencies tree.