Modern Data Analytics in Excel

Chapter 3. Transforming Rows in Power Query

Chapter 2 served as an introduction to Power Query’s myth-busting capabilities as an ETL tool for Excel. In this and upcoming chapters of Part I, you’ll have the chance to get hands-on practice with common data transformation tasks. The focus of this chapter is on rows.

Data cleaning often involves row manipulation tasks such as sorting, filtering, and removing duplicates. Traditional Excel offers interface-guided methods for these tasks, but they can be cumbersome and hard to replicate. Power Query offers a solution by enabling an auditable and repeatable data cleaning process without coding. To follow the demonstrations in this chapter, please access ch_03.xlsx in the ch_03 folder of the book’s repository.

In the signups worksheet of this workbook, your organization’s party planning committee has been gathering RSVPs and wants the final list to be sorted alphabetically, with duplicates, blanks, and misprints eliminated. The committee is weary of manually sorting and removing unnecessary rows whenever new data is added. They desire a workbook that can be easily refreshed and reused as more individuals register or as new parties are scheduled.

Load this data into Power Query, naming the query signups. Capture all relevant rows in column A and confirm that your table includes headers before proceeding.

Removing the Missing Values

As mentioned in Chapter 2, Power Query provides a dedicated null value to represent missing values. The ...