Holy Macro! Books M Is for (Data) Monkey: A Guide to The M Language in Excel Power Query

Much of learning about power query can be done by reference to video guidance and having a play with the various options available in the power query ribbon. However, this will only take you so far and once you get onto the more advance points around the structure of the language there are very little resources that pull things together in a coherent way. That's where I believe this book comes in and it takes the user through the more basic (but still more suited to a more advanced excel user) aspects of power query. It's worth noting at this point that the resources that the authors have provided are extremely useful, well put together and tie in with the screenshots within the book.The chapters are arranged so that advanced power query features sit towards the back of the book. Whilst these are useful you can get by very successfully with power query without them they do offer more features and would enable users to create power query spreadsheets that are more akin to 'solutions' rather than a mishmash of queries that have to be clicked in the right order.I've been through the book once to get a feel for it but I can see myself needing to go back through again, working through some of the examples in order to get the full benefit. Well done to Ken and Miguel!

By far, this is the best book (currently) available to learn about using Power Query (otherwise known as Get and Transform) in Excel and Power BI. Like Rob Collie's book on PowerPivots, this is another MUST HAVE book for those learning to use Power BI or wanting to push their Excel skills to the max. I simply cannot rate this highly enough. Don't hesitate - buy it!

Very clear explanation of what Power Query is about. The authors make a great case in showing how this is a game changer. I used to work with MS Access as the "engine" to do our data manipulation with the aim of feeding Excel pivot tables. When I started reading this book I went through two phases:- Phase 1: got incredibly sad, even annoyed, that all that effort into mastering SQL queries became obsolete.- Phase 2: got incredibly excited about how easy my life will be from now on.Some other books (e.g. Collins and Singh) cover the querying part plus visualization, reports, etc. However, if you want extra focus on the querying part itself, this book is a great resource.

Using this to improve excel data reporting skills. To get the most out of this you need to dedicate the time and effort to work your way through the examples and this will open up opportunities on how to improve your data reporting and impress the boss..

This book really is excellent. The chapters are broken down into nice bitesize chunks, so it is easy to pick up and learn little and often. They also made it very easy to follow along with the examples on your own machine. Would definitely recommend this to anyone that uses Excel or Power BI as there is almost certainly something you can automate.