Earlier this year a new feature was added to Power Query in Excel and Dataflows that very few people noticed: the abilty to export all the queries in the Power Query Editor to a template file. The reason few people noticed it was that, when the feature released, the only place you could import a template file was in a Power Platform dataflow. The documentation for exporting from Excel and importing to a Power Platform dataflow is very detailed and can be found here:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-query/new-dataflow-from-template
With the release of Fabric you can now import templates into Gen2 Dataflows. This means you can export a template from a Gen1 dataflow and import it into a Gen2 dataflow, which is documented here:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/data-factory/move-dataflow-gen1-to-dataflow-gen2
Joining the dots, this also means you can now export a template from Power Query in Excel and import it to a Gen2 dataflow. This makes it easy to develop on your PC before pushing your work up to Fabric. Here’s a quick walkthrough of how to do this.
In Excel Power Query let’s say you have one or more queries in the Power Query Editor:
If you then go to the File menu in the top left corner of the screen you’ll see the option to export to a template:
If you click this menu item, you’ll see a dialog where you can enter a name and description for the template:
Click Export and you can save the template to a .pqt file.
If you then create a new Gen2 Dataflow in Fabric then, in the middle of the screen, you’ll see the option to import from a template:
[Notice also the Export Template option in the top right corner]
If you import the .pqt file created in Excel the queries in it will get created in the dataflow. You may need to re-enter credentials:
Once you’ve done that, the queries run:
Template files are the way the cool kids share their Power Query queries these days and no kid is cooler than my colleague Alex Powers who, I saw on Twitter recently, has created a template file that scrapes all the ideas from the Fabric Ideas site:
[If you do import this template close to the time of writing this post you may run into this bug from the list of known issues for Fabric Data Factory and Dataflows]
Hopefully we’ll start to see more and more useful Power Query queries and functions shared as template files!
The post Power Query Templates In Excel And Fabric first appeared on Chris Webb's BI Blog.