Power Query And Power BI Connectivity Announcements At The Microsoft Business Applications Summit

There were a lot of exciting announcements at the Microsoft Business Applications Summit this week but if you only watched the keynotes or read the recap on the Power BI blog you will have missed all the Power Query-related news in the “Data Prep in Power BI, Power Platform and Excel using Power Query” session:

https://mymbas.microsoft.com/sessions/1332f59f-a051-4a06-ae50-8f3185501a88

It covers all the new things that have happened in Power Query over the last few months such as Diagram View and, more importantly, talks about what’s going to happen in the next few months. It’s relatively short but for those of you with no time or patience, here’s a summary of the roadmap announcements:

[BTW “Power Query Online” is the browser-based version of Power Query that is used in Power BI dataflows]

My highlights are:

• The ability to create a dataflow quickly by uploading a file to Power Query Online without needing to use a gateway to connect to a file on-premises, useful for one-time import scenarios.
• Multi-value M parameter support – useful for dynamic M parameters and other things I can’t talk about yet 😉
• The things that Miguel talks about regarding “easier design experiences” for Synapse are kept intentionally vague but it’s worth listening to carefully to what he says here!
• Native SQL support for Snowflake, BigQuery and Redshift – this is really useful for anyone who wants to use DirectQuery with these databases because it will allow you to write your own SQL query and use it as the source of a table, rather than having to use a table or a view.
• AAD based Single Sign-On support for Redshift and BigQuery (similar to what we have today for Snowflake) will also be very important for DirectQuery, because it means that the identity of the user running the report can be passed back to the database.
• A dataflows connector for Excel Power Query – which means, at last, you’ll be able to get data from a dataflow direct into Excel. This will make a lot of Excel users very happy, I think: a lot of the time all users want is a table of data dumped to Excel and dataflows will be a great way to do provide them with that.

Last of all, the session showcases the great new home for all things Power Query – http://www.powerquery.com/ – which has great resources, newly-updated documentation and a blog. Make sure you check it out!