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Get & Transform (Power Query) in Excel for Mac - Phase 1

Guy Hunkin's avatar
Guy Hunkin
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Oct 02, 2019

Excel 2016 for Windows introduced a powerful set of Get & Transform Data tools. These tools, based on Power Query technology, enable you to easily connect, combine, and shape data coming from a variety of sources.

 

Today, we are excited to announce the first step in a journey to support Power Query in Excel for Mac. This is by far the most popular idea on Excel UserVoice under Excel for Mac category. In this release, you can refresh your Power Query queries on Mac from Text, CSV, XLSX, XML and JSON files, and you can author queries with VBA.

 

Getting started

The new functionality is live for all Office 365 subscribers in Excel for Mac running version 16.29 (19090802) and later. If you are running an earlier version, find out how to update your Office for Mac.

 

Refreshing Power Query queries

You can now refresh the Power Query queries in your workbook that pull data from Text, CSV, XLSX, XML or JSON files. Triggering the refresh command is done the same way that you've been doing it so far. For example:

  • Click on the Data tab of the ribbon > then choose Refresh All
  • Right-click on your query table > then click Refresh
  • Right click on your PivotTable > then click Refresh Data
  • Use a VBA script
  • And more...

 

Please note that upon the first time you try to refresh your workbook queries, you may need to update the location of the data source so that it works on your Mac. Click the Data tab on the ribbon > Connections > select the desired connection > and click Change File Path button to update it.

 

Authoring Power Query queries

With this update, you can also create and manage Power Query queries in your workbook using VBA. Any existing macros and VBA scripts that reference Workbook.Queries and WorkbookQuery entities in the Excel's object model will work in Excel for Mac as expected.

Note: You may still need to adjust your scripts to reflect the notion of a file path on Mac (e.g.,  /Users/USERNAME/Desktop/data.csv) that is different than a file path on Windows (e.g., C:\Users\USERNAME\Desktop\data.csv).

 

Sharing your feedback

Let us know what you think and submit your feedback using Send a Smile/Frown (Send us a Smile :slightly_smiling_face: or Frown :slightly_frowning_face: button at the top right)!

 

Stay tuned for more updates!

 

Guy Hunkin

Program Manager, Excel

Updated Oct 02, 2019
Version 2.0
excel
Get & Transform
Get & Transform Data
mac
power bi
Power Query

136 Comments

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  • odhanson's avatar
    odhanson
    Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
    Oct 04, 2019

    Gareth890, yes. This is the current experience when linking to local files from shared workbooks on both Mac and Windows. Unfortunately, Mac (Unix) and Windows use completely different file paths.

  • Gareth890's avatar
    Gareth890
    Copper Contributor
    Oct 04, 2019

    Due to the difference in file path names, does this mean a Power Query in a shared workbook cannot be used by both Mac and Windows users?

  • Guy Hunkin's avatar
    Guy Hunkin
    Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
    Oct 03, 2019

    Ed Hansberry, the goal is to support full query authoring on Mac. As you can understand, this is an expensive project and we adopted a staged delivery plan - we aim to release valuable functionality to the users as soon as we are done with coding and testing.

     

    Hope it helps.

     

    Guy.

  • The_Gov's avatar
    The_Gov
    Copper Contributor
    Oct 03, 2019

    Hi there,

     

    Can you please give us an update or time frame when the Power Query feature will be included in the Excel 365 for Mac?

     

    No one at Microsoft has given any Office 365 for Mac user a time frame on when this feature will be available for all Mac users.  We pay a yearly subscription to use Office 365 and we expect Office 365 for Windows to have the exact features as Office 365 for Mac.

     

    KINDEST REGARDS

     

     

    PAUL

  • Ed Hansberry's avatar
    Ed Hansberry
    Iron Contributor
    Oct 03, 2019

    Is there a plan to actually be able to author queries using an editor similar to the one in Excel on Windows and Power BI Desktop on Windows? That is when it gets really useful.

     

    Or is the end goal to support most/all data refreshes, but the assumption is the authoring happens on Windows clients?