Power BI’s Power Query Editor is a powerful tool that allows users to transform and manipulate their existing data into a clean structured format suitable for analysis and visualization.

Microsoft’s Clean, transform, and load data in Power BI lesson introduces users to Power Query Editor and teaches them how to perform some basic data cleaning and transformation functionalities. Below, find the contents of the lesson with shortcuts to each topic. When applicable, links to supplemental materials are provided under the relevant topic header.

Lesson content:

• Introduction (2 minutes)
• Shape the initial data (18 minutes)
  • Promote rows to headers.
  • Rename columns.
  • Remove top rows.
  • Remove columns.
  • Pivot and Unpivot columns.
  • Power Query user interface.
• Simplify the data structure (8 minutes)
  • Rename a query.
  • Replace values.
  • Replace null values.
  • Remove duplicates.
  • Best practices for naming.
  • Creating calculated columns.
    Click here for a video walkthrough.
• Evaluate and change data column types (10 minutes)
  • Change column data type.
• Combine multiple tables into a single table (8 minutes)
  • Append queries.
  • Merge queries.
  • Joins.
  • Managing data relationships.
    Click here for a for a video walkthrough.
• Profile data in Power BI (20 minutes)
  • Examine data structures.
  • Find data anomalies.
• Use advanced editor to modify M code (4 minutes)