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. 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. Commonly used data query tasks include:

• Connecting to data
• Shaping and combining data
• Grouping rows
• Creating pivot columns
• Creating custom columns
• Creating query formulas

Import

Import is the most commonly used method to acquire data and uses the Power BI query engine. This method is most useful for static data sets.

Direct Query

For more actively changing data and large data sets, the Direct Query method is useful for querying remote data in real time, rather than querying a local copy. You can use this method when the data set is so large that it slows the TSheets.