A few years ago I started blogging about Power Query. Back then life was simple: I put “Power Query” in the title of a post and everyone knew what I was writing about, because Power Query was an Excel add-in you could download and install. Now, however, the technology has been renamed “Get & Transform” in Excel 2016 and is a native feature of Excel; the name “Power Query” only applies to the add-in for Excel 2010 and 2013. What’s more, the same technology is used in Power BI’s Query Editor and it’s also now in Azure Analysis Services, Analysis Services 2017 Tabular and the Common Data Service. This is obviously a good thing – I think Power Query is one of the best things to come out of Microsoft in the last decade – but it also presents me with a problem. How can I write about this technology if it doesn’t have a single, official, easily identifiable name?
In more recent times I’ve written posts with unwieldy names like “Introduction to Insert Topic Name Here in Power Query/Power BI/Excel 2016 Get & Transform” and in the future I suppose this will have to grow to “Introduction to Insert Topic Name Here in Power Query/Power BI/Excel 2016 Get & Transform/Analysis Services Data Loading/Common Data Service”. Tagging and categorising blog posts can help here, I know, but it’s the title of a blog post that’s the main determining factor as to whether it gets read or not when someone is looking at a list of search results. It’s getting ridiculous, but how else can I ensure that someone searching for the solution to a data loading problem in Excel 2016 Get & Transform will find a post I’ve written that contains the answer but shown in Power BI?
Inside Microsoft I understand that the team that builds this technology is known as the Power Query team. I certainly think about this technology as being called Power Query, as do a lot of other people in the community. However, my argument is that I can’t just use the name “Power Query” when I’m writing or speaking about this technology because most of its users – especially those who are new to it and who need the most help – don’t think of it as “Power Query”. They think of it as Excel 2016 Get & Transform, the Query Editor in Power BI Desktop and so on, the specific instances of it.
Maybe I’m making too big a deal of this, but in my opinion this is a problem not just for me but for Microsoft too. We all know how much developers rely on internet searches to find solutions to problems, and not having a single name for this technology makes it much harder to search successfully. This in turn makes it less likely that when a developer runs into a problem they will be able to solve it, which in turn means they are less likely to want to use this technology in future.
What’s the answer? It has to be to make the “Power Query” brand visible somewhere in the UI of all the products that use Power Query technology. I know there’s a risk of confusing users instead of helping them here (am I using Power Query or Power BI?), but it could be as simple as making a few small changes like renaming the “Query Editor” window to be the “Power Query Editor”:
I think that would be enough to let people know that “Power Query” is a technology in its own right and that content referring to “Power Query” is relevant to Excel, Power BI, SSAS and everywhere else that Power Query is used. It would also be nice if, now that M is the official name of the M language (and not Power Query Formula Language), the Advanced Editor window and the Custom Column dialog let users know that the code they were writing in them was in a language called M and not some mysterious, nameless scripting language.
What do you think? I’m interested to hear your comments and opinions…
UPDATE: victory is ours! See this comment from Faisal Mohamood of the Power Query team below –
Hey there Chris – what you are saying makes complete sense. Power Query is the name of this capability and we will highlight the name of this capability as such in experiences where you are working with Power Query (and M).