Power BI is a data analytics tool developed by Microsoft used to visualize data and find useful insights. In this article, you will see how to work with the Query Editor in Power BI desktop. Power BI comes in various versions, i.e., Power BI Desktop, Power BI Service, Power BI Mobile, and Power BI Developer. Power BI desktop is the free version, and the query editor is available in all three versions.

Power BI Desktop has several components to transform, model, and visualize data and also generate reports from data. The Query Editor in Power BI is used to transform or edit data files before they are actually loaded into the Power BI.

The Query Editor plays the role of an intermediate data container where you can modify data by selecting rows and columns, splitting rows and columns, pivoting and unpivoting columns, etc. The changes made by the Query Editor in Power BI are not reflected in the actual dataset. Once you have pre-processed the data and have transformed it into the required format, you can load the data into the Power BI environment.

Power Query is a data transformation and data preparation engine. Power Query comes with a graphical interface for getting data from sources and a Power Query Editor for applying transformations. Because the engine is available in many products and services, the destination where the data will be stored depends on where Power Query was used. Using Power Query, you can perform the extract, transform, and load (ETL) processing of data.