Power Query is an Excel add-in that can be used for data discovery, reshaping the data and combining data coming from different sources. Power Query is one of the Excel add-ins provided as part of Microsoft Power BI self-service solution.
Power Query is an Excel add-in that can be used for data discovery, reshaping the data and combining data coming from different sources. Power Query is one of the Excel add-ins provided as part of Microsoft Power BI self-service solution.
You can think of an ETL tool built into your familiar Excel to search or discover data from a wide variety of data sources (both from your enterprise as well as from online public data sources). Power Query has an intuitive and interactive user interface which can be used to search, discover, acquire, combine, refine, transform and enrich the data.
Getting Started with Power Query for Excel:
Power Query allows users to search or discover data across the enterprise or from valuable public data sources available online as well as from a variety of other data sources. It allows you to bring in data into Excel from virtually any type of data sources as listed below:
From the web:
i. From a file: Excel, CSV, XML, Text or Folder that contains files with metadata and links.
ii. From a database: SQL Server, Windows Azure SQL Database, Access, Oracle, IBM DB2, MySQL, PostgreSQL and Teradata.
iii. From other data sources: SharePoint List, OData feed, Windows Azure Marketplace, Hadoop Distributed File System - HDFS, Windows Azure Blob storage, Windows Azure Table storage, Active Directory and Facebook.
Apart from the above data sources, Power Query allows you to search data publicly available online or published data from your organization. This online search of data, along with data integration from the above types of data sources, makes it a real quick ETL tool built right inside your Excel.