Note: This workout is a bit different from the others.

Why Participate

Power Query is one of the best tools available for data cleaning, preparation and transformation. It has a very well-designed UI that can tackle a large number of data problems, as well as in incredibly powerful language (M code, short for “Mash-up”) to handle more advanced transformations and the development of custom functions.

The Excel BI Excel/Power Query Challenge is an enormously popular practice exercise run by Excel BI founder and Enterprise DNA partner Vijay Verma. These exercises run daily, giving you the opportunity to rapidly level up you Excel and Power Query skills by solving intermediate to advanced problems (solutions typically involve writing some level of custom M code) in community with some of the top experts from around the world, including multiple Microsoft MVPs who regularly participate.

Workout Leader

Vijay Verma is the founder of Excel BI Analytics and the creator of the Excel BI Challenge. He is one of the world’s foremost experts on Power Query with over 76,000 posts on the Microsoft Community forum, over 8,800 marked solutions (#1 all-time in PQ solutions) and nearly 60,000 upvotes received. He also has achieved the rank of Super User on the MS Power BI forum.

His simple-to-understand yet intensely creative and challenging exercises are at the heart of the Excel BI Challenge’s success since he initiated it in mid-2022.

Schedule

Workouts are posted nightly at 4am UTC at https://www.linkedin.com/in/excelbi/.

Technically the M-F challenges are labeled “Excel” challenges and the weekend challenges are “Power Query” challenges, but in reality participants use whichever tool they like for each challenge. The main difference is that the weekend challenges tend to be a somewhat higher level of difficulty, with some of them being extremely challenging, even for advanced users.

Enterprise DNA has partnered with Vijay and Excel BI, allowing us to post his challenges on our site as well. Because LinkedIn posts are not permanent, we are in the process of posting all 200+ of his past challenges here in our Workout Center so that you will always be able to access them, use them as practice exercises and, search them more easily than you can on LinkedIn.

We currently have over 90 exercises posted and are working to get the remainder posted ASAP. Once we have those posted, we will also work on capturing the incredible archive of creative solutions submitted by the participating community.

How to submit your solution

When you have completed the workout, just post your code (in whatever tool you choose – in addition to Excel and Power Query, some participants submit solutions in SQL, Python and/or R). Please blur or hide the details of your code using the forum features.