Modern Data Analytics in Excel

Preface

Welcome to the Excel revolution. By updating how you think about and use Excel, you can unlock significant productivity gains and use your data more powerfully. This book introduces the “modern Excel” suite of features and other powerful analytics tools.

Learning Objective

By the end of this book, you should be able to use modern Excel tools for data cleaning, analysis, reporting, and advanced analytics. In particular, you’ll clean and transform data with Power Query, create relational models in Power Pivot to build sophisticated analyses, and explore the Excel analytics toolkit to further automate and enhance your work.

Prerequisites

To meet these objectives, this book makes some technical and technological assumptions.

Technical Requirements

To make the most of this book, it is recommended that you have a Windows computer with the Microsoft 365 version of Excel for desktop. The features covered in this book are relatively new and may not be available in older Excel versions. Please note that many of these tools are still being developed for Mac, and compatibility may vary. Due to the fast-paced nature of Excel’s development, it is difficult to provide a precise list of what’s available for each version.

Chapter 7 of the book briefly explains how to load a Data Model from Excel into Power BI. It assumes that, as a Microsoft 365 for Windows user, you already have the free version of Power BI Desktop installed on your computer. Chapter 12 delves into the integration ...