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Intermediate 6 hours of video 38 lessons Exercise files included Certificate of completion

Power Query

Stop cleaning the same file every month. Build repeatable transformations that refresh with one click.

About this course

Power Query is the answer to the most expensive habit in office work: manually cleaning the same export, the same way, every single month. You build the transformation once, and from then on refreshing takes one click. For most professionals it is the single largest time saving available inside Excel.

What you will be able to do

  • Connect to CSV, Excel, folders, databases and web sources
  • Use the query editor: applied steps, data types, and why step order matters
  • Unpivot badly-shaped reports into clean tabular data
  • Merge and append queries instead of copy-pasting between sheets
  • Split, extract, trim, replace and conditionally transform columns
  • Handle errors and changing source files without the query breaking
  • Combine every file in a folder into a single refreshable table
  • Understand enough M language to read and adjust a generated step

Course content

8 modules · 38 lessons · approximately 6 hours of video

Module 1 — Why Power Query exists

The manual clean-up loop, and what a repeatable pipeline replaces. Where queries live and how refresh works.

Module 2 — Connecting to sources

Files, folders, workbooks, databases and web pages. Relative paths and parameters so the file works on someone else's machine.

Module 3 — Shaping data

Removing columns and rows, promoting headers, changing types, splitting columns and filling down.

Module 4 — Unpivoting and pivoting

Turning a cross-tab report into tabular data — the transformation that makes everything downstream possible.

Module 5 — Combining queries

Append versus merge. Join kinds explained properly, with the join that silently duplicates your rows.

Module 6 — Folder automation

Combining every file in a folder, handling a new month's file automatically, and dealing with inconsistent headers.

Module 7 — Robustness

Error rows, changed source columns, data type drift, and how to make a query fail loudly rather than silently.

Module 8 — A gentle look at M

Reading the generated code, editing a step by hand, custom columns, and simple parameters.

Requirements

  • A computer with Microsoft Excel installed. Microsoft 365 is recommended; where a feature is version-dependent, the lesson states this and shows the alternative approach.
  • No software is provided with this course. Learners must hold their own licence for any Microsoft product used.
  • Roughly 6 hours of study time, which you can spread over as long as you like — access does not expire.

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