Tag: Power Query

Its name is Power Query Formula Language. But if you call it that, no one will know what you are talking about. The original informal language name M seems to have stuck, and even the Microsoft documentation refers to M. Every time you create a query in Power Query, whether in Excel or Power BI, […]

Several authors have described how to use the M function Diagnostics.Trace to monitor the performance of queries built with Power Query. In this installment, we will look at how to use the same function to record row-level error information in the trace log. Regardless of how we intend to use Diagnostics.Trace, nothing at all can […]

Power BI can obtain datasets from R scripts, though as of the September 2016 release of Power BI the integration is not so slick. For example, we may wish to explore a possible log-linear relationship in our data or the potential of a polynomial relationship. While we could, in principle, add columns to a dataset […]

Hopefully, this blog will quickly become outmoded and useless and I will have wasted my time. Error handling in the Power Query Formula Language, most often simply called “M”, is weak compared with most modern programming environments, and the developers at Microsoft will no doubt address these issues and provide a better system. But, for […]

You have to be careful with economic data (with economists, too, but that’s an entirely different story). Is the data seasonally adjusted? Do the numbers represent current values or have they been adjusted to reflect the dollar’s average value in 2010? For such reasons, it is not uncommon for economists to annotate tables of data. […]