Master Your Data with Power Query in Excel and Power BI

What it’s about

For any data analyst or business professional who wastes countless hours on the tedious, error-prone manual labor of cleaning and preparing data in Excel, this book is your key to liberation. Traditionally, this 'black magic' required complex formulas, VBA, or SQL knowledge, creating brittle and hard-to-maintain solutions. 'Master Your Data' introduces Power Query as a game-changing ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) tool that allows you to automate the entire data preparation workflow with an intuitive, visual interface. The authors, both leading Power Query experts, guide you from fundamentals to advanced techniques, teaching you how to connect to any data source, apply repeatable transformations, and load clean, analysis-ready data with the click of a button. By mastering the principles in this book, you will not only save enormous amounts of time but also increase data accuracy, build scalable solutions, and finally free yourself to focus on what truly matters: generating valuable insights from your data.

The through-line

Who it’s for

A business professional or data analyst who spends a significant amount of time manually importing, cleaning, and preparing data in Excel. They want to stop wasting hours on repetitive, error-prone tasks and focus on the valuable work of analyzing data and generating insights.

The problem

They are constantly battling 'dirty' data from various sources (text files, Excel sheets, databases) that requires hours of manual manipulation using complex formulas, VBA, or copy-pasting to get it into a usable format. They feel frustrated, bored, and unproductive, stuck in a cycle of tedious 'data janitor' work. They worry about making mistakes and feel their true analytical skills are being squandered on tasks that should be automated.

The plan

1. Learn the fundamentals of Power Query's interface and the ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) process.
2. Master the core transformation techniques for cleaning, reshaping, and combining data from any source.
3. Structure your queries for maintainability and scalability using best practices for query management.
4. Apply your automated workflows in both Excel and Power BI to produce refreshable reports and analyses.

The payoff

You will become a 'Data Master,' effortlessly transforming messy data into clean, analysis-ready tables with a few clicks. · Repetitive data tasks will become fully automated, freeing up hours or even days of your time each month to focus on high-value analysis and strategic work. · You will build robust, reliable, and refreshable reports that impress your colleagues and management, elevating your status as a go-to data expert.

See our guide

• Practice Business Intelligence & Data Science →

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Additional reading

• skillwave.training · Ken Puls, Miguel Escobar, and Matt Allington

  The authors' official training site, which hosts the example files for the book and offers further self-paced and coached training in Power Query, Power Pivot, and Power BI.

• powerquery.training · Ken Puls and Miguel Escobar

  The authors' original training site, mentioned in the acknowledgements as the project that fostered the content for the first edition of the book.

• Microsoft Power Query M formula language documentation · Microsoft

  Referenced in Chapter 15 as the official specification document for the M language, which can be explored via the `#shared` keyword within Power Query itself.

Featured in these guides

• Practice Business Intelligence & Data Science →Cited source