There were a couple of big (well, big if you’re a Power Query fan like me) announcements made today by Miguel Llopis at the PASS BA Conference:
- Today Power Query is available only to people who have Excel Professional Plus or Excel standalone, but as of May a version of Power Query will be available on every Excel SKU. There will be some limitations around data sources that are supported if you don’t have Excel Professional Plus, but that’s ok – this change will make it much easier for people to learn about and use Power Query, and I’m really happy about that.
- Other new features coming in the May update of Power Query include the ability to turn off prompts about native database queries (useful in this scenario, for example), OData v4.0 support, the ability to use alternative Windows credentials to run queries, and a couple of new transformations such as removing empty rows.
- Excel 2016 – where Power Query is now native to Excel – will have support for creating Power Query queries using VBA and macro recording. I understand you won’t be able to edit individual steps in a query, but you’ll be able to create and delete queries programmatically and change where they load their data too.
- Excel 2016 will also support undo/redo for Power Query and give you the ability to copy/paste queries (even from workbook to workbook).
- There was a commitment that Power Query in Excel 2016 will keep getting updates on a regular basis, rather than get tied to the much slower Office release cycle, so it retains parity with the Power Query functionality in the Power BI Dashboard Designer.
All very cool stuff!
