Power Query Editor
If you followed our instructions, your Power Query Editor window should look like Figure 1-4.
FIGURE 1-4 Power Query Editor after connecting to Excel and a folder
As you can see, after you instructed Power Query to automatically combine files from the folder, it created the Targets query and several helper queries, whose names are italicized—this means they won’t be loaded. We will review the data loading options later in this chapter, and we’ll continue using the same queries we created in this example.
Note Companion Files
You can review the steps we took by opening the file 1.1.1 Connect.pbix from the companion files folder.
Query dependencies
You can check the dependencies queries have by selecting Query Dependencies on the View tab. The Query Dependencies view provides a diagram like the one in Figure 1-5 that shows both data sources and queries.
FIGURE 1-5 Query Dependencies view
To view the dependencies of a specific query, select a query, and Power BI will highlight both the queries that depend on the selected query as well as queries and sources that the query depends on.
The default layout is top to bottom; you can change the layout by using the Layout drop-down list.
Change data source settings
After you connect to a data source, sometimes you may need to change some settings associated with it. For example, if you moved the WideWorldImporters.xlsx file to a different folder, you’d need to update the file path in Power BI to continue working with it.
One way to change the data source settings is to select the cog wheel next to the Source step under Applied Steps in Query Settings in Power Query Editor. After you select the cog wheel, you can change the file path as well as the file type. The shortcoming of this approach is that you will need to change settings in each query that references the file, which can be tedious and error-prone if you have a lot of queries.
Another way to change the data source settings is by selecting Data source settings on the Home tab. This opens the Data source settings window, shown in Figure 1-6.
FIGURE 1-6 The Data source settings window
The Data source settings window allows you to change the source settings for all affected queries at the same time by selecting Change Source. You can change and clear the permissions for each data source by selecting Edit Permissions and Clear Permissions, respectively. Permissions include the credentials used for connecting to a data source and the privacy level. Privacy levels are relevant when combining data from different sources in a single query, and we will look at them later in this chapter.