One of the things I like least about Power Query at the moment is the lack of control over where the results of your queries end up in Excel. For example, if you create a new query and load it onto a worksheet, your table always ends up in the top left hand corner of a worksheet. Furthermore, it seems like every time you refresh your query, then the table it’s bound to gets deleted and recreated so any extra calculated columns or formatting you have added to the table disappear.
There is, however, a way around this. If you go to the Data tab in Excel and click the Existing Connections button you can see the OLEDB connection that Power Query creates in the “Connections in this Workbook” section:
You can then double-click on the connection and create a new table from that connection, call it whatever you want, add formatting, calculated columns and so on and all of these things will remain intact when you refresh. Even better, when you refresh the table it will re-execute the underlying Power Query query. This is a much better experience for consuming the results of your Power Query query, in my opinion.
Incidentally, Miguel Llopis of the Power Query team told me on the forum that this is an area of functionality that they hope to address in early 2014, so hopefully this blog post will be redundant in a few months.
