Self-Service ETL in Power Query

The Power Query add-in for Excel 2013 enables expert users to extract, transform, and load data from databases and many other sources for self-service business intelligence (BI), analysis, and other applications. Power Query plays an important role in creating interactive reports for Power BI, Microsoft’s hosted BI service. However, Power Query is designed for individual data transformation in Excel and doesn’t have the advanced features available in server-based tools (such as SQL Server Integration Services) that provide audit controls to protect company data, output to data warehouses for archiving, and scalability to meet high-end performance requirements.

Self-Service Data Transformation Overview

Power Query is a free extract, transform, and load (ETL) add-in for Excel and is also being deployed as a feature set in new Power BI report design tools, currently in preview. This report focuses on the current (Apr. 2015) production release of Power Query used in Excel; however, customers should expect most of the features discussed here to also be available in the new Power BI report design tools. (See the sidebar “Power Query Roadmap“.)