You can connect to the world of data with Power BI, generate attractive and engaging reports, share your efforts with others, and help them expand their business intelligence initiatives. Power Query assists you in connecting to sources, shaping and transforming data to fit your needs.

Power Query in Power BI

Microsoft Power Query is a data connectivity and data preparation solution. It essentially allows business users to access data contained in data sources while changing it to meet their needs. It’s simple to use, entertaining, and even convenient for no-code users.

Power Query Editor in Power BI

The Power Query Editor is the primary data preparation experience that is natively integrated into a variety of Microsoft products, including but not limited to Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Power BI, Microsoft SQL Server Data Tools, and others. This, in turn, enables users to apply over 300 different data transformations in the user experience by previewing data and selecting transformations.

Let’s look at how we can access the power query editor in power BI.

There are two ways to access the power query editor. First, after loading your data into the power BI, you will go to the Home tab and select “Transform Data”. 

The second way to access is when you are loading your data into Power BI, you will select the tables you want and then click on “Transform Data”.

Here’s how Power Query Editor looks after connecting to a data source:

1. Many buttons in the ribbon are now active to interact with the data in the query.
2. Queries are listed in the left pane and can be selected, viewed, and shaped.
3. The data from the selected query is shown and ready for shaping in the center pane.
4. The Query Settings window displays, listing the query’s properties and steps that have been applied.

After this step, you can now transform your data so that it can be visualized later to create dashboards.