M and the Advance Editor

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The last thing I want to talk about before we actually go into Power Query and we start going through all the possible transformations that you have on the user interface is M and the advanced editor and the formula bar.

This I recommend you to do even if you just got started with Power Query. If you go here to View, there is something called formula bar. As you can see it does the same as in Excel, you have a formula bar in Excel too, so you can click here and it shows. What is showing you is: for each step that you create with Power Query a new line of code gets created and that code is something called M language. If you go here > Advanced editor, you will see that for each step:source =source, promoted headers = promoted headers, change type = change type a new line was created and what happens is: once you click on something in Power Query, M code is written behind the scenes.

Now M code is very useful and we have a module, an entire module actually, dedicated to this. It is just an introduction, so don’t worry, we’re not going to teach you how to code, but I want to show you how powerful M is and the basics of it, so you are not fearful of it and you get a bit curious and hopefully you start learning right now. It’s possible!

This is what you need to take out from this lesson, set the formula bar and every time you create a step you just go and look into the formula bar to see what was created. It will help you start learning M, while you’re making basic transformations and once you get to the final module to the M module you will be able to understand you can actually tinker with M code and do quite advanced things without knowing so much about it, but that will be at the end.

For now, there is an advanced editor that shows you everything that’s been created, turn on the formula bar and know that there’s something called M that is written on the background.

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Lesson tags: Power Query
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