What I Wish Someone Had Told Me About Working With Data in a Small Team
In a small team, you're the analyst, the engineer, the dashboard designer, and the person who explains what a p-value is at the all-hands.
Tutorials, opinions, and tricks for people who live in the Microsoft stack — and want to stop fighting the software they're already paying for.
In a small team, you're the analyst, the engineer, the dashboard designer, and the person who explains what a p-value is at the all-hands.
The Keep Rows filter in the Power Query UI handles 80% of row filtering tasks without you ever opening the Advanced Editor. Most people skip past it and go straight to writing M. Five clicks and you're done, and the M it generates is clean enough to modify later.
The analysts who get traction aren't the fastest at pulling data, they're the best at unpacking what was actually being asked. The skill is asking good questions, and nobody trains for it.
VLOOKUP and XLOOKUP, but for files that don't fit in memory, joins on multiple keys, and many-to-many matches that VLOOKUP simply can't do.
Power Query is a brilliant transformation tool. Most of the M code in production is doing things that belong in DAX, SQL, or Python - and the models are slow and the code is unmaintainable because of
Step-by-step from a blank flow, including how to handle the parts that break the first time.