What is Power Query and its role in extraction?

< 1 min read

Power Query is the data extraction and transformation layer inside Power BI.
It connects to sources like SQL Server, Excel, APIs, and flat files.
In my project, we extracted sales data from SQL and customer data from CRM Excel.
We cleaned null values, changed data types, and merged tables there.
Filters were applied to pull only required historical records.
Query folding helped push these transformations to the database.
We also created calculated columns like fiscal month during extraction.
All steps were saved and reused during scheduled refresh automatically.
This reduced manual data preparation by business users.
Basically it prepares clean, structured data before it reaches the data model.

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