Power Query Use Case: Contact Management

Happy new year everyone!

Of all the components of Power BI, Power Query was by far the one I was originally most skeptical about. How can an end-user be responsible for creating their own ETL when this process is usually so complex? After I started to play with the technology, I was really surprised that Power Query accomplished easily tasks that would take many hours with traditional tools and fulfilled the promise of self-service ETL.

Furthermore, the power of Power Query is in the flexibility of the technology for data transformation as well as the multiple connectors available. One example is the Exchange connector that allows access to the data of your emails, calendar, and address book.

Over the past few months I have been using Power Query, not for ETL, but to help manage my Outlook contacts by automatically identifying new people to add to the address book, and selecting subsets of contacts to send emails for my distribution list.

If you would like to learn more about this use case, how I was able to increase my contacts from 500 to 2,300+ by leveraging the network I had already built but not leveraging, I invite you to read my complete article: Maximize your Impact: Contact Management with Office 365, Excel and Power Query.