Last week, Dominic Petri shared a link on Twitter that contained some important news from Microsoft: as of the March release of the Office 365 click-to-run version of Excel 2016, the old methods of loading data into Excel will be replaced by the newer “Get & Transform” functionality that is better known as Power Query. All the details are here:
Up to now Excel 2016 users have had to deal with a rather confusing compromise whereby the older data loading functionality existed side-by-side with the new “Get & Transform” functionality on the Data tab of the ribbon. From the March update onwards though the Data tab will look like this:
There are also several other cool new features being introduced, such as the ability to export Power Query queries to .odc files so they can be shared between workbooks, and new UI for managing connections and queries. You’ll still be able to get the old data loading functionality back via the Options dialog if you want.
If you’re a regular reader of this blog you’ll know that I’m a massive fan of Power Query, so naturally I’m really happy to see this happen. I believe it’s a big step forward for Excel in terms of its BI and reporting capabilities and the fact that this functionality is almost identical to the data loading functionality in Power BI means that Microsoft’s overall BI story becomes even more compelling: the skills you learn in Excel are transferable to Power BI and vice versa. On the other hand I can guess this is going to cause confusion for some users – similar to what happened when the ribbon first appeared in Office 2007 – but I don’t think this can be avoided. Ultimately the benefits will outweigh any disruption caused as users have to learn the new way of doing things.
