As mentioned in the previous post, the awareness of Power Query is extremely low. In my experience, the hurdle for people who have learned Power Query but not feeling comfortable in using it is the fact that they are not well informed about the three major steps involved:

If we learned Excel long enough, we are all trained to move cells around on worksheets for reshaping data; copy and paste for data consolidation; setting formulas for data cleansing or calculations, and so on and so forth. In Power Query, we are doing the same but through quite a different process, listed above. That is normal for people having difficulty to start with Power Query.

So, from now on, please bear in mind that the first step when using Power Query is always getting the data.

Power Query empowers users to get data from multiple sources. It could be data sitting within current Excel Workbook, another Workbook, CSV/TXT files, Web, PDF, or even files from a folder and many more. One of the cool things in this process is that we don’t even need to open the files with the data we need. Remember this: Power Query can read the data from a file (or source) without “opening” it.

Once we get the data (connect to the data source), all the cleansing / transformation magic will happen within Power Query Editor.

It is particularly important to get ourselves familiarized with the User Interface of Power Query Editor because most of the transformation steps are performed via different command buttons on the ribbon.

To illustrate the process and the User Interface of Power Query Editor, I have made this video:

I hope you like it. If you do, please give it a thumbs up, share and subscribe to my channel.

More videos on Power Query are coming. Stay tuned! 😉