Sometimes prospective customers ask me: “Should I learn Power Query or Power BI”.
Full disclosure: I provide Power Query training. So this may not be an unbiased opinion.
What is Power BI?
Power BI is an analytics and visualisation tool from Microsoft. You can use it to create interactive dashboards. For example, you can allow users to drill down into details, or switch between departments.
You can download and use a desktop version of PowerBI for free, but in order to do anything really useful with it you need to be able to share it with others, and for this you will need some sort of organisational licence which usually costs some money.
Microsoft’s Power BI overview makes it sound like a very complicated piece of kit that’s only for enormous organisations with data lakes. In reality, I have seen smaller organisations use it well.
What is Power Query?
Microsoft describe Power Query rather drily as “a data transformation and data preparation engine”.
I prefer to think of it as a magic box of tools that allow you to clean, transform and combine data. It makes a number of Excel based tasks easier – and because you can replicate the process easily, you can automate the process for next time.
Power Query is used within Power BI to prepare and shape the data for further analysis and presentation. But you can also use it completely independently of power BI. And as a finance professional, that’s what I do.
If you ever get sent a report where you have to add some workings, remove some columns or headings and then do something else with it (analyse it, send it someone, upload a journal from it) then Power Query can help you do this. Again and again and again.
I also use it a lot for combining data. For example, I might have budgets in separate workbooks – Power Query makes it easy to combine these and keep them updated.
So should I learn Power BI or Power Query?
This really depends on your role and what you want your future role to be. Power BI is useful if you are in an organisation that already uses it, or if you want to work somewhere that does. It’s useful for data analysis and reporting roles.
It’s also quite a big undertaking to learn it properly. There are lots of “Dashboard in a day” type courses, but to really get to grips with Power BI, be prepared to learn Power Query, DAX, as well as learning the theories behind data modelling and data visualisation.
Power Query potentially has many more applications. For example, you can use it in operational or transactional type roles to automate your processes. And of course, it is a key part of Power BI. So if you want to go down that route, starting out with learning a bit of Power Query will only be helpful.
My introduction to Power Query course has been carefully designed to give you a good overview in half a day of what Power Query can do. It’s taught via practical examples based on my experience of leading finance teams.
And it’s not just useful for finance teams. Anyone who uses Excel for more than three hours a week will probably benefit from learning a little Power Query.
In my course I also touch on data modelling which will be useful if you decide to learn Power BI.
I usually run the course online in small groups, but I can also deliver power query training in person. You can find out more about my Power Query training options here.
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