Welcome another lesson in the Mastering Excel series. This lesson is a slight departure from previous lessons. This lesson is looking into the future and delving into what Excel is becoming: a powerhouse for data analysis. Power Query is the first step in analyzing data, before you do any substantial analysis, you need to get the data into Excel. Not only get data into Excel but probably clean it up. Parse columns, join columns, remove errors, you know, that kind of stuff.
Of course, you can add a column with formulas to do this. That will work for 100 or 1,000 rows of data. What about 250,000, 700,000 or even 1,000,000 rows? Excel really slows down with that many calculations. Power Query solves this. It shapes the data before it gets into Excel. You will learn how to use Power query to split columns, parse data, check for errors, get data from multiple files in a folder, and more. Power Query remembers all the steps you took. To get new data, you simply have to click the 'Refresh' button.
***OK, THIS IS IMPORTANT***
Power Query is a new feature in Excel. It is standard in Excel 2016 and it can be installed in some previous versions of Excel, but not all. Before buying this lesson, please go to this Microsoft website, check out the requirements and try to install Power Query.
If you cannot install Power Query because you do not have the correct version of Excel, you will not be able to follow along with this lesson. Do not buy this lesson if you cannot install Power Query because you have the wrong version of Excel (Man, I can't believe I said that...)