Excel Power Pivot and Power Query For Dummies

Chapter 12

Extending Power Query with Custom Functions

In This Chapter

Making a custom function

Using custom functions in other queries

Creating a parameter query

In Chapter 8, you see that Power Query records all actions using its own formula language (known as the M language). When you connect to a data source and apply transformations to that data, Power Query diligently saves your actions as M code behind the scenes in query steps. The transformation steps can then be repeated when you refresh the data in your query.

That backstage coding is relatively transparent, and can, for the most part, be ignored for most data processing activities. In this chapter, I show you how to leverage the M language to extend the capabilities of Power Query to create your own custom functions and perform truly heroic data processing.

Creating and Using a Basic Custom Function

When building a custom function for Power Query, you’re essentially doing nothing more than creating a query and manipulating its M code to return a desired result. That result can be an array, a data table, or a single value.

To help you gain a sense of the general steps taken to create a custom function, I show you ...