Introduction to Power Query in Excel

Overview

Explore Excel Power Query for advanced data transformation and cleansing to boost your decision-making and analysis.

Unlock the true potential of your data! Say goodbye to manual data wrangling and hello to streamlined, efficient data transformation. In this introductory course to Excel Power Query, you will learn how to seamlessly connect to multiple data sources, clean and shape your data easily, and load it so it’s ready for analysis. Along the way, you will learn about the many available functions that Power Query offers, giving you the confidence to streamline your next Excel-based report. Whether you're a data analyst, business professional, or spreadsheet enthusiast, this course will empower you to save time, make more informed decisions, and extract valuable insights from your data like never before.

Syllabus

Getting Started with Power Query in Excel

Imagine Excel as you've never seen it before – Power Query opens a window to a whole new world of data possibilities! In this chapter, you’ll explore the layout and features of Power Query and its interplay with traditional Excel workbooks. You’ll load data from multiple sources and learn to structure them through column and row manipulations while maintaining an applied steps log of all your actions.

Data Cleaning and Preparation

In this chapter, you’ll harness Power Query’s digital cleaning features to prepare a squeaky-clean dataset! Column profiling features will be covered, allowing you to handle errors and missing data effectively. You’ll also master eliminating duplicate data and correcting for data entry issues and outliers.

Column Transformations

It’s time to transform! This chapter covers many basic column transformations - a vital step in the journey from raw data to meaningful insights. You will learn how and when to apply numeric, date/time, and text transformations to both transform and derive column contents with Excel Power Query’s many built-in features.

Shaping and Grouping Data

It’s all about shaping and grouping in this final chapter! You will get hands-on experience with powerful transformation options to bring your analysis prep to the next level. You’ll learn how and when to apply transpose, pivot, and group-by transformations - all within the Power Query editor. You’ll also learn how to leverage existing queries to build new ones and track their connection in the Query Dependencies tree.