Querying Data
Querying Data in Microsoft Power BI
Power BI enables easy connection to data sources, customization and merging of data points, and data visualization tools. Power BI has many methods for querying, connecting, and shaping data. Commonly used data query tasks include:
- Connecting to data
- Shaping and combining data
- Grouping rows
- Creating pivot columns
- Creating custom columns
- Creating query formulas
Querying Data Options
The Querying Data Options section explains how to connect, load, and edit data. Direct Query or Import methods are used depending on how large the data set is and how up-to-date the data is required to be. Importing is the most commonly used method to get data and uses the Power BI query engine. This method is most useful for static data sets. For more actively changing data and large data sets, the Direct Query method is most useful to query remote data in real time, rather than querying a local copy. You can use this method when the data set is too large and may slow Microsoft Bing.