Power Query for Excel September 2015 update
This month?s Power Query update includes the following new or improved features:
- Support for custom MDX/DAX queries when importing data from SSAS
- Navigator dialog improvements
- Query Editor improvementsYou can continue reading below for more details about each feature.
Support for custom MDX/DAX queries when importing data from SSAS
In this update, we have added the ability to provide a custom query in MDX or DAX when importing data from Analysis Services. This allows users to leverage their existing MDX or DAX queries from other tools, instead of having to build them from scratch in Power Query.
Navigator dialog improvements
We made a couple of improvements to the Navigator dialog in this update, including:
- Resizable Navigator dialog?Users can now resize the Navigator dialog, so that they can easily preview tables with lots of columns.
- Multi-select items in Navigator?Users can now use keyboard shortcuts to select multiple items more easily in the Navigator dialog, such as Ctrl+Click or Shift+Click.
Query Editor improvements
Query Group creation/deletion?The first set of Query Editor improvements is around making many of the Query Group operations easier. All these options are available in the Queries pane, via context menus for queries and query groups, including:
- Create New Group option, without having to send some queries to this new group
- Multi-select groups
- Delete a groupExtract previous Query steps?Another improvement to the Query Editor is the ability to extract steps from a query. Users can now easily extract steps from a query into a ?base? query. This is useful when you want to have multiple queries that have a common base set of steps.
This option can be found as a right-click menu entry for any given step in a query.
When clicked, users are asked to provide a name for the new ?base? query.
The result is a new query containing all steps prior to the one that was selected, with the original query containing a reference to the newly created one. Users can then create new queries that reference the ?base? query.
Query icons to reflect type of query?The last improvement this month is that the Workbook Queries pane and the Queries navigator, in the left side of the Query Editor dialog, have been improved to capture the type of each query. This is represented with different icons for each query in these two panes.
That?s all for this month. We?re making lots of incremental improvements to Power Query, and we hope that you find it better with every new monthly update. Please continue sending us feedback using our ?Send a Smile/Frown? feature or by voting for what you?d like to see next.
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Power Query for Excel is available with an Office 365 ProPlus subscription, Office 2010 Professional Plus with Software Assurance, Office 2013 Professional Plus or Excel 2013 Standalone. Power Query for Excel is also available in all other Excel 2013 Desktop SKUs with reduced functionality. Check out the System Requirements section on this page for more details.
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*Not all updates apply to every Office 365 plan; please check the individual post for specifics.