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).
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Stay tuned for more updates!
Guy Hunkin
Program Manager, Excel