If, like me (and Ruth), you spend your life in Power BI but have a lingering feeling that you should get round to learning Python for data analysis sometime then here’s something you should check out: the new Data Wrangler extension for Visual Studio Code. All the details are in the announcement blog post:
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/python/data-wrangler-release/
…and this video is a great introduction to what it does:
Why is it interesting for someone like me? Because it works in a very, very similar way to Power Query – except that instead of generating M code in the background, it generates Python. It doesn’t have the same amount of functionality that Power Query does and the UI is a bit more basic but anyone with Power Query experience will feel immediately at home. I got it up and running very easily and I can see that it will be great for anyone learning Python or who needs a productivity boost.
May want to mention that this is for Visual Studio Code Insiders only.
This is interesting. I’m not a huge fan of python, but it certainly has some advantages over the PQ language, M.
I suspect that some of the more “magical” features of PQ won’t be available like query folding. Maybe there are other features – equally magical – that make up for it…
A nice package to EDA in Python: D-Tale
That’s very nicely done. Thanks for pointing it out.
Very interesting feature but I see this plugin as a “visual” data wrangling for people who don’t want to code. Definitely python has much much more wrangling functionalities than M, and R would be much better because it is a functional language with huge control by chaining functions. I really prefer to do this in R before power bi.
@ Chris – did you know that there was an Excel Garage Project called Transform Data by Example
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/garage/blog/2017/05/transform-data-example/
Unfortunately like many other revolutionary ideas introduced in Excel over time – like inserting the Power BI Visuals in to Excel or the Data Mining add-in or Wolfram alpha data types or Search Public Data Sources in earlier versions of Power Query or the Developer Edition of Excel in 2022 or the Data Tracking Template – which was the origin of Power Apps and many more – the limited vision in the Excel leadership team allowed these ideas to just die instead of improving upon them
Hello, this is available in Power Query under: “Add a column by example”
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/add-a-column-from-an-example-power-query-cd82c570-8da7-4d70-91a1-3827b5995eab