Develop Power Query outside Power BI or Excel

Power Query can struggle is when it’s used for heavy data engineering workloads, for example:

• Very large datasets (hundreds of millions of rows)

• Complex iterative logic or procedural transformations

• Transformations that don’t fold back to the source

• Large multi-stage pipelines where each step materializes intermediate data

In those situations, tools like SQL, Spark, or Python are often better because they are built for set-based processing at scale.

Hi Lajouac 

Currently, Power Query development is primarily designed to work within Power BI Desktop, Excel, or Power Query Online (Dataflows).

While it is technically possible to use tools like the Power Query SDK with VS Code to write M code, the setup can be complex especially when dealing with authentication and data source connections.

In practice, most users still rely on Power BI Desktop for development and debugging, and then reuse the logic in Dataflows or Fabric for production scenarios.

At this time, there isn’t a fully supported standalone IDE experience for Power Query outside Microsoft tools.