The short answer: no.
The long answer:
It is, technically, possible to use Power Query (in either Power BI or Excel) to write data to a data source; for example, here’s an old post I wrote showing how to run a UPDATE statement to update data in a table in SQL Server. However because the Power Query engine may evaluate a value or statement more than once when a query is executed, it is therefore not safe or supported to use it to try to create, insert, update, delete or otherwise change data in a data source – it should only be used to read data. You may see some functions listed in the M function reference that suggest otherwise but they aren’t supported either, and indeed may not work at all.
Thanks to Matt Masson of the dev team for providing the official position on this.
But it is a good news! in many organizations datasets come in a period of time basis. The online procedures do the updates. The reports come later…
Chris, You are right out of the box it’s impossible in Excel & BI. We specialize in add-on tools (https://www.acterys.com) that actually allow you to write back Power Query results in Excel. It’s explained in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daZNa4pJ9KA
Once the data is in Excel you can even use the Microsoft Flow add in or a Zapier add in to move that data to wherever you want, but that’s more of a capability of Excel rather than Power Query itself..
Power Query per sé, inside Excel and Power BI Desktop, shouldn’t be used to upload data or do any “actions” against a data source.
Those type of “actions” will be available inside of Logicapps, flow and others. More on the why Power Query inside Excel and Power BI wasn’t designed for these over here: https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/ad808464-8819-45ac-a015-b53938095aae/how-to-use-webmethodput?forum=powerquery#fda41c1f-6ddc-4dec-8634-0f7bf06d5a53
Martin,
Does your solution allow write back to any data source or only acterys database?
Hi Nick, we have added a new feature in our October Update (https://www.acterys.com/acterys-october-update/) that allows you to edit any RDBMS table from Excel. The full write back features (top-down/bottom-up, relative changes etc). from Power BI and Excel are only available in relational models created with the Acterys Modeller as they are reliant on a properly structured star schema and Acterys meta data handling.
Well, right now you can use Dataflows or CDS-A and the results are written to ADLS v2, so “technically” the answer should be “it depends” 🙂
You can generate csv files directly from your Query:
“Export PowerQuery query to CSV” trick described by Ivan Bondarenko
https://excel.city/2018/06/export-powerquery-query-to-csv/