Fully community-driven documentation for our favorite part of PowerBI: PowerQuery.

Perfection is the enemy of good.

I’ve had this project in the works for over a year now, and it’s time to finally dedicate the time and resources needed to get this thing live. I think we can all agree that the Microsoft-official documentation around Power BI can sometimes be less-than-helpful: That’s why we’ve got so many stellar blog post creators out here in the community putting their efforts towards making things that are more user-friendly, and deeper dives than the official documentation provides. One of my favorite examples of this is Dax.Guide from the folks over at SQLBI, and I’ve taken some inspiration from them for this project.

The biggest problem I’ve always had with the official PowerQuery formula reference from Microsoft is that their examples don’t necessarily apply to real-world scenarios. They often will create tables in-line in the M script in order to provide something that could be copy/pasted into the tool, but this ends up confusing end users of the tool because they’re not used to seeing this syntax, and it can make it difficult at times for a business user to apply these examples to their actual data.

That’s where pqm.guide comes in.

This is a fully community-driven documentation effort, backed by Github in a method similar to a lot of the other MS Learn pages. The idea is to have members of the PowerQuery community come together to create a documentation platform that gives a great breadth and depth of information, compiles together links to existing community resources, and allows for organic growth to occur over time. Anybody out there in the world can put in a pull request to the github repo, suggest changes to our documentation, and then myself (or eventually, a team of PowerQueryHeroes) can review these changes before merging into the main site for the world to see.

I’m hoping that this project can grow to be something akin to a combination of Dax.Guide and Dax.Do from our favorite Italians. Right now it’s a very simple text-based site, but I can see this growing in the future to include videos per function, a page dedicated to linking other PowerQuery content creators (shout out to Ben Gribaudo for some of my personal favorite posts), and in an ideal world, even containing a sample database that folks could directly query against by using the Web connector in PowerQuery, so that we can provide common use-case scenarios with truly helpful sample code.

It should be worth noting that I am no expert in WebDev, or really any true expert in PowerQuery to the level of Alex Powers or Imke Feldmann, so I am ABSOLUTELY actively looking for other folks to get involved in this project not only by contributing to the documentation pages, but also reviewing pull requests, building out additional features on the site, and more. If you want to get involved, please reach out to me on Twitter, Linkedin, or email (listed in the “about me” section of this site) and I would love to find a way to get you plugged in.

In the last two weeks across Data Insights Summit 2022 in Chicago, and the first ever Power Platform Conference in Orlando, I’ve seen a huge outpouring of support for #PowerQueryEverything, so let’s see the community truly come together and build something great here!

Oh and I’m also no expert on WordPress since this is my first self-run blog, but you can just type pqm.guide into your web browser to find the site, and the github repo is linked somewhere on each page (or at https://github.com/KyleAMueller2/pqm-guide). I’m going to work on building out some good sample pages of content in the coming days, but for now you can use Dax.Guide as inspiration if you’re looking to contribute.