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Getting Started with Power Query – Part I

Headshot of article author The Power BI Team

Welcome the Excel and Power BI getting started series.

Today we’re starting with the first step of the data analysis process: Discover and Get Data.

Power Query allows you to easily discover and connect to data from public and corporate data sources. This includes new data search capabilities to facilitate discovery, as well as capabilities to easily transform and merge data from multiple data sources, so you can analyze the data in Excel.

In the following video you’ll learn how to:

  1. Perform an Online Search, import public data results, and visualize these results in 3 easy steps with Excel
  2. Apply some easy transformations to your newly gathered data with the Power Query editor
  3. Connect to external Data Sources
    1. Files
    2. Data Bases
    3. Web
  4. Perform more complex data transformations such as changing the data type, deleting columns and adding calculated fields while saving your steps on the Query editor
  5. Combine data from different sources and files
To start this tutorial you’ll need: