Creating And Using Functions in Data Explorer (Power Query)

NOTE: This post was written before Data Explorer was renamed as Power Query. All of the content is still relevant to Power Query.

I’ve been reading through the Data Explorer Formula Language and Library specifications (which can be downloaded here) over the last few weeks, learning about what’s possible with it when you go beyond the UI. This will translate into a lot of Data Explorer blog posts in the coming weeks…! Here’s the first of those posts.

Today I’m going to look at how to create and use functions. Page 86 onwards in the Formula Language specification has a lot of detail about how to define a function in the M language that Data Explorer uses, but it doesn’t include any practical examples of how functions can be created and used in Data Explorer and Excel unfortunately. I’ve done some experimentation, though, and this post aims to fill that gap.

First of all, take a look at this Excel worksheet with two tables in it, called InputNumbers1 and InputNumbers2:

Let’s say that you want to create two Data Explorer queries that each use one of these tables as a source, and in both cases you want to add a third column that displays the product of the two existing columns. So, for example, for the first table you want a new column with the values 2, 12, 30 and 56 in.

Now this is a very simple calculation and certainly one that Data Explorer can handle easily, but let’s say that you want to perform this operation many times in many different queries and for obvious reasons you don’t want to have to duplicate the same logic in each query. You want to create a function!

To do this, you need to use the Write Query option from the From Other Sources button on the Data Explorer tab in the ribbon:

Then change the name of the new query to MultiplicationFunction by double-clicking on the query name in large letters at the top of the Edit Query dialog:

Then enter the following code as the only step:

= (x,y) => x * y

This defines a query with two parameters, x and y, and returns the product of x and y. Click Done to save the query. The query will show the following result in the worksheet:

You can ignore this new table, and you can disable the data load onto the worksheet, but it seems like you always need to have the table there and you certainly can’t delete it.

To use this new function create a new query from the table InputNumbers1 (shown above) using the From Table button. Then in the Edit Query dialog create a new step by selecting Insert Column/Custom:

And then use the new function to calculate each row in the new column, passing the two existing columns as parameters:

This results in the following step:

= Table.AddColumn(Source, “Custom”, each MultiplicationFunction([FirstNumber],[SecondNumber]))

And so you have your new column showing the product of the [FirstNumber] and [SecondNumber] columns. Then do the same thing for the InputNumbers2 table and you’ll have two Data Explorer queries now with custom columns in:

Finally, to make sure that the function is indeed being used, go and alter the definition of the function to be

= (x,y) => x / y

Refresh both of the other queries, and you’ll see the contents of the custom column have changed for both of them:

I can imagine that the ability to break functionality out into functions will reduce the complexity, and improvement the maintainability, of many ETL solutions that get built with Data Explorer in the future.

You can download my sample Excel workbook with this demo in here.