K2's Accessing Your Company's Data With Power Query And Power BI

Absolutely. Power Query is built into Excel 2013 and later, and the interface and functionality are virtually identical between Excel and Power BI. You'll learn Power Query in the context of Excel throughout this course—the same skills apply directly in Power BI whenever you're ready to use it. Mac demonstrates working with Power Query in Excel extensively because he knows every accountant uses Excel daily, whether or not they use Power BI for reporting.

No. Power Query is specifically designed as a no-code, low-code solution. You show Power Query what you want to do through its graphical interface, and it writes the M formula language code behind the scenes for you. Mac walks through multiple real examples—like filtering Utah cities by population, cleaning up messy QuickBooks exports, and calculating population density—where he builds queries entirely by clicking and selecting, never typing code.

You'll be able to import data from multiple sources (web pages, CSV files, Excel workbooks, databases, and accounting systems via ODBC), clean it up automatically using transformations like filtering, splitting columns, removing duplicates, and handling errors, then load it into Excel or Power BI ready for analysis. For example, you'll learn to build a reusable query that refreshes a report with one click instead of manually cleaning the same dataset weekly—turning hours of manual work into minutes of automation.

When you use Power Query, the data transformations you perform are saved as repeatable steps. If your data source updates, you simply refresh the query and all your cleanup steps run automatically—you never manually clean that data again. Without Power Query, you'd repeat the manual process every week. Additionally, Power Query handles data type issues (like preserving leading zeros in zip codes) more reliably than Excel's standard import, and it keeps your cleaned data separate from your analysis, which is critical for automation.

Yes, if you have ODBC access to your accounting solution. Mac demonstrates connecting to Sage 100 during the course to build an aging of accounts receivable report by salesperson—a report that Sage doesn't provide built-in. Most commercial accounting solutions including QuickBooks, SAP, Sage 100, and others are ODBC-compliant. You may need to purchase an ODBC driver (ranging from about $150 for QuickBooks to more for enterprise systems), but once connected, you can query live data directly for specialized analysis without manual exports.