M Is for (Data) Monkey: A Guide to the M Language in Excel Power Query Kindle Edition

Having danced around Ken Puls' ExcelGuru.ca website in moments of Power Query need I felt it was time to get back to the basics and finally learn a solid foundation as opposed to jumbled pieces put together over time. The one thing that I will say about this book is there is a LOT of information packed into 226 pages from getting started to the much more advanced topics found in the later chapters. Several times my eyes were almost in disbelief at the potential of Power Query (Get & Transform) and how I could immediately start putting this into action at the day job. Having an earlier edition of the book I realized several times throughout that Microsoft's improvements have eliminated some of the more tedious steps of Power Query past. Both Ken and Miguel's overall tone throughout the book was also a testament to respecting their audience's Excel experience and going in depth only as needed to allow each lesson to continue to build on one another.I would highly recommend this book to anyone in a Data Analyst or Reporting Analyst role.

I bought this book with the expectation that I needed to know M and that I would start learning M from the beginning of this book. But this book does an excellent job of demonstrating why the Power Query user interface is so powerful, and why -- although you sometimes do need to write M code -- the UI is still your starting point. By the time I reached chapter 6 (unpivoting a table) I felt the book had already paid for itself... and there's way more to come.

I had been wondering for a while (like the past year or so) what Power Query was, but I was not really finding a good, clear answer. When this book became available I got a good, clear answer. I was excited previously by Power Pivot and what was possible with it, but this book changed the way I looked at a number of my usual tasks when I thought Power Pivot was going to be the answer. Power Query provides SQL query capabilities from within Excel, and provides an excellent pathway for data to come into Excel from both external and internal sources, and the authors demonstrate those capabilities very well. This was my favorite book purchase for 2015 and I plan on using it heavily in the coming years.

I learned about the multiple uses of Power Query about a year ago and it has revolutionized my data analysis skillset. The stuff I can do with PQ now is unbelievable whereas beforehand, it was impossible. I can take reports from a .txt and do wizardry through PQ and create a proper dataset that can then be summarized. I can do this each month now and be done literally within minutes. This book teaches the wizardry for becoming a data magician. Well worth my money.

Probably the only decent book out there that is specifically geared to the power query model. I was looking for a solution to merge two QuickBooks reports I had dumped out to CSV files. This book solved my problem. Can't beat that. If you are a QB user and hate the Advance Report engine, dump that junk and dig into power query.11/22/16: I have since used PQ extensively since acquiring this book. This is a great starter book, but I quickly flew past it into more complicated areas not covered by this edition. There is a whole lot of stuff Ken and Miguel can go into in a follow up book. They should look at publishing an edition that focuses on the Mashup Query Language solutions itself as a companion to the this book.

Good book on M, it successfully straddles the how and why. This may be the only definitive guide on M out there at the moment, I'm not sure how I got by without Power Query for as long as I have. There are some useful books on DAX (this is NOT a book on DAX), but don't overlook the role of pre-shaping and automating your data model. Power Query is one of those things that once you get it, you just get it. This was the first book I purchased on my recent journey into Power BI, and I'd do it all again. Bought the Kindle version, and after getting through it, I bought the physical book. It's that useful.

Awesome reference - I have used it so much that it is ragged and frayed! And what's neat is that everything that you learn about Power Query (PQ) is translatable to Excel Power BI (where it found as Get Data). I like to describe PQ as the "Excel import wizard on steroids" and it is invaluable to those of us that use/combine/mash together data from disparate sources. This reference has the broadest and deepest compilation of PQ "stuff" out there. Couple that with a well keyed Google/Bing search and you can easily find a way to your data end point.

I can't say enough good things about this book! The authors, Ken Puls and Miguel Escobar, present Power Query in a way that is totally accessible to Excel users. There are clear explanations, good examples and files so the reader can perform the steps along with the book. I have gone through the book at least three times, and participated in a training workshop given by the authors, and I continue to learn new things each time.In the book Ken and Miguel say, "There is no doubt in our minds that Power Query will change the way Excel pros work with data forever." I'm not sure I'm quite to the level as an Excel pro (I hope to be when I grow up!), but this book definitely HAS changed how I work with data. Power Query and the M language makes it fun to do data cleanup!

I love this book. I'm an Excel power user of old and an executive who needs a quick and effective way to wrap my head around Power Query. After googling my heart out in my spare time I've cobbled together enough knowledge to be dangerous, but also produce some fascinating insights into my organisation's performance...and then I hit a wall. Now it's time to reach out and grab a book. But which one? After a couple hours of running through the examples, and having a flip forward to see where all this is going, I can tell you which book to buy! THIS ONE! Not only does it take you from zero to hero in no time, it does it in a fun and engaging way. Well done guys, and thank you.

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.

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!

I bought this book as to me Power Query (i.e. transforming that data) in many ways is more crucial than using Power Pivot and DAX to summarise the Data. This book is the best on the market and will guide you through using modern excel to Transform larger data sets (for pretty much any source) to use in Excel. This is recommended to any finance or data analyst who wants to learner how to transform data which would have previously been done by a programmer or database administrator.