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A deeper dive into Excel: Power Query

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Wouter Vanderkelen
Senior Business Consultant

Are you ready to discover the hidden powerful tools expanding the functionalities of Excel increasingly? Read on.

Almost every established company uses Excel, whether it is daily or less frequently. Until today, this software, part of the Microsoft Office suite, is for end users the most used tool for processing data. However, there is often a need to change the imputed data before you can use the data in a meaningful way.

For example:

  • the removal of unnecessary spaces
  • converting uppercase to lowercase
  • merging different tables via vlookup
  • add or remove a column
  • splitting a column

This isn’t always that easy by using the basics of Excel.

Unknown powerful tools

You probably know the useful standard functionalities of Excel. Nevertheless, it can happen that they can become too complex and time consuming. Therefore, there are some hidden powerful tools expanding the functionalities of Excel increasingly.

The most important ones are Power Pivot and Power View.

With Power Pivot you can create data models you can visualize with Power View, which is in fact a pre-version of Power BI.

However, the most powerful tool is Power Query.

It is capable of taking away a lot of the usual burden. Compared to Excel formulas, the following operations are more convenient by using Power Query:

  • Import data from a wide range of data sources
  • Clean and remove data
  • Reshape your data by merging and appending it
  • Automatic data update

Power

Power Query VS Power BI

Power BI is the most advanced visualization tool from Microsoft enabling businesses to make better decisions based on their data. Power Query is a crucial part of Power BI and guess what? It’s also in Excel 2016 and Office365 by default.

It’s worth the try!

Should you have any questions, ask our ‘DataScience’ team.

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