Writing M for Power Query training course

This page has 0 threads | Add post

Blogs

Finding our blogs useful? Please consider helping us to share more!

Writing M for Power Query training course
Learn about our new Writing M for Power Query training course.

Posted by Andrew Gould on 20 August 2025

In this blog

What Power Query does
The Power Query M formula language
Learning to write M code

What Power Query does

Power Query is a fantastic tool for quickly cleaning and manipulating data that you're importing in applications like Power BI and Excel. We teach delegates how to use Power Query in several of our existing courses, including Introduction to Power BI, Advanced Excel and Advanced Power BI Data.

Each of these courses explains how to use Power Query's menus and right-click options to quickly apply basic transformations to your data. You can take a mess like this:

Messy data imported into Power Query in Power BI Desktop

A useful but messy dataset downloaded from the BFI's website.

And, with just a few clicks, convert it into something useful for reporting like this:

A neat and tidy table ready to load into a Power BI data model or Excel pivot table.

The Power Query M formula language

When you modify your data in this way, behind the scenes, Power Query is quietly writing a script in the Power Query M formula language, or just M for short. In much the same way as you can record a macro in Excel and then look at the VBA code that's been generated, you can look at the M code for any query you've created.

A Power Query query written in the M formula language

What a query really looks like!

Learning to write M code

While you can perform many basic operations using Power Query's menu options, learning how to write M code gives you access to a range of techniques that are either difficult or impossible to achieve using Power Query's regular tools. Our new Writing M for Power Query course teaches you how to get started with the M language and get to grips with writing queries from scratch.

A neat query written in Power Query M formula language

A neat and tidy query written in M.

If you're interested in learning how M really works, or you just want the ability to tidy up your queries without fear of breaking things, book yourself a place on one of our upcoming Writing M for Power Query courses and M-power yourself!

Some other pages relevant to the above blog include:

This blog has 0 threads

Add a new post