I love the “Modern Excel” suite of tools and wish more spreadsheet users would adopt them. But I can understand the slow adoption… it’s confusing! For example, you may be interested to start using Power Query in Excel, but the first step is to go to Get & Transform Data… why? And what’s the relationship between Power Query and Get & Transform?
Get & Transform is the gateway
As I wrote about in this post, Power Query is an extract, transform, load (ETL) tool for Excel:
Let’s focus on the Extract and Transform steps of that for now. They sound a lot like Get and Transform, right? There’s a reason for that.
You start every Power Query job by first getting the data from somewhere. Then you transform it (filtering, sorting, merging, you name it). Finally, you load it somewhere else. So, while introducing the first steps to Power Query as “Get & Transform” in Excel, there is some logic to it.
To summarize the relationship…
All Get & Transform is Power Query…
But not all Power Query is Get & Transform. They are just the first steps. Does that relationship make sense?
If you’d like to kick-start your learning journey with a primer on Power Query for Excel users, check out my free white paper on the topic:
What questions do you have about Power Query? Are there other terms or concepts that don’t make sense? Let me know in the comments.
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