Looking for some summer holiday (or winter holiday, depending on which hemisphere you live in) reading? If so, may I suggest my new Power Query book? “Power Query for Power BI and Excel” is available now from the Apress site, Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and all good bookstores.
It’s an introductory level book. It covers all of the stuff you can do in the UI, it has a chapter on M, and it goes into a reasonable amount of detail on more advanced topics; it is not a 500-page exhaustive guide to the product. I’ve focused on readability and teaching the fundamentals of Power Query rather than every looking at every obscure M function, but at the same time if you’ve already used Power Query I think there’ll be plenty of material in there you’ll find interesting.
Now for the bad news: the book is out-of-date already, although not by much. One of the best things about Power Query is the monthly release cycle; unfortunately that makes writing a book on it a bit of a nightmare. I started off writing in January and had to deal with lots of added functionality and changes to the UI over the next few months; I had to retake pretty much all of the screenshots as a result. The published version of the book is based on the version of Power Query that was released in early June rather than the current version. Hopefully you can forgive this – the differences are minor – but it’s a good reason to buy the book as soon as you can! I want to do a second edition in a year’s time once (if?) the release cycle slows down.
I’ve been teased a bit for blogging and teaching so much about Power Query recently, so the final thing I want to say here is why an old corporate BI/SSAS guy like me is getting so excited about a self-service ETL tool. Well, the main reason is that Power Query is a great piece of software. It does what it does very well; it does useful things rather than what the marketing guys/analysts/journalists think is hot in BI; it is easy to use but at the same time is flexible enough for the advanced user to do really complex stuff; it is updated regularly based on feedback from its users. I only wish all Microsoft software was this good… Honestly, I wouldn’t be able to motivate myself to blog and write about Power Query if I didn’t think it was cool, and even though it hasn’t been hyped in the same way as other parts of the Power BI stack it is nonetheless the part that people get excited about when I show them Power BI. It’s not just me either – every day I see positive comments like Greg Low’s here. I think it is as important, if not more important, than Power Pivot and I think it will be a massive success.
Oh, and did I mention that I’m also teaching a Power Query course in London later this year….?
