Not only is Power Query a phenomenal tool for transforming data in Excel, it also enforces good data hygiene 🧼.
What do I mean by that? Think about the steps that you take every day to present your cleanest, freshest self to the world. Your personal hygiene routine (I know it’s the internet, but you look good ✨!).
We can apply a similar set of steps and rules to making our data predictably clean. And perhaps the first step on this front is to 📋 keep the source data intact.
This may seem counterintuitive: if the source data is dirty, don’t we want to clean it? 🤔
Of course we do. But we want to do it in a way that is easy to follow and reproduce. Manually hiding or deleting columns that we may want later is like showering *after* you’ve put your clothes on for the day… not a good look, and it may cause some questions among those putting you in a position of authority😲.
Power Query enforces that you work on a *copy* of the source data, and even then you must operate on this copy via a set of repeatable tasks.
This is such a powerful “mental model” to grasp and another reason to include Power Query in data education as early as often as we brush our teeth 🪥. If you’d like to get your team started with Power Query in Excel, check out my corporate workshop here.
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