What is the primary function of Power Query in Power BI?

The primary function of Power Query in Power BI is to connect and transform data. Power Query acts as a data connection technology that allows users to discover, connect, combine, and refine data across a wide variety of sources. This is foundational to the data preparation process, as it helps in cleaning and reshaping data into a format that is suitable for analysis and visualization.

Using Power Query, users can perform various transformations such as filtering rows, changing data types, merging tables, and aggregating data. This powerful data manipulation capability is essential for building accurate reports and dashboards in Power BI, as it ensures that the datasets being used are clean and well-structured.

Creating reports and dashboards relies heavily on the quality of the data prepared through Power Query, while analyzing visualizations is more about interpreting the data once it's in a usable format. Storing datasets, although part of the broader Power BI ecosystem, is not performed by Power Query but rather by the Power BI Service or the underlying data model where the data is saved after transformations.