Power Query Tutorial – What is it, How to use, Full examples, Tips & Tricks

power query tutorial and examples

Power Query (Get & Transform data in Excel) is a true game changer ?. It can simplify and automate various data activities. In this in-depth blog tutorial, learn all about this powerful time-saving technology. You will learn:

* What is Power Query and how to launch it from Excel or Power BI?
* How to connect and load data from any type of sources – excel files, CSVs, text files, web pages, PDF, folders etc.
* How to perform common data cleansing activities with Power Query
* Adding columns using rules
* Automating data collection, clean-up and publishing processes with Power Query
* Web scraping with Power Query
* SQL style Joins, merges, appends and unions with Power Query
* Consolidating data in a folder
* Data load, save & publish process
* Tips & tricks on using Power Query efficiently

Combine multiple Excel files using Power Query [Full example + download]

Say you want to combine multiple Excel files, but there is a twist. Each file has few tabs (worksheets) and you want to combine like for like, ie , all Sheet1s to one dataset, all Sheet2s to another dataset…

To make matters interesting each sheet has a different format.

What now?

Of course Power Query to the rescue.

5 tips: Power Query for Accountants (and finance people) – Free Masterclass

Power query tips for accountants

Do you work with accounting or finance data? You are going to love, no scratch that, adore Power Query. It can save you precious time, make you look like a hero in-front of clients and keep you sane.

In this masterclass, learn all about Power Query for accountants (and other kinds of finance people) & 5 tips.

Why Power Query?

Power Query is a data processing software. Using Power Query, you can create process driven programs (queries) to collect data, clean or reshape it, calculate things and publish final output as a table. Once you create a query in PQ, when the underlying data changes, you just refresh the query and brand new data will be fetched, cleaned and published for you.

For example, you can use Power Query to combine ledger files from various accounts to one master file with Power Query. No more VBA or manual copy pasting. Just one query and you are done.

How to consolidate data that is different shapes [BYOD]

Last week, I asked my email newsletter readers to submit “one data analysis problem you are struggling with”. We called it BYOD – Bring your own data. More than 100 people have emailed various interesting (and often very difficult) problems. This week (between 16th of February to 20th of February), let’s take a look at some of these problems and solve them.

Consolidating data in different shapes

We can use either VBA or Excel’s consolidation features to combine data that has same shape (ie same number & type of columns). Here is one way to do it.

But what if we need to consolidate data that is in different shapes?

Something like above.

In such cases, we can use 3 powerful tools.

  1. Multiple Consolidation Ranges – Pivot Tables
  2. VBA
  3. Power Query

So let’s examine how to use these approaches to consolidate data in different shapes.

Extract data using Advanced Filter and VBA

In this post we will learn how to use the Advanced Filter option using VBA to allow us to filter our data on a separate sheet. This has been requested by a lot of our readers and here is how we will use them.