Forum Discussion

Lajouac's avatar
Lajouac
Advocate I
4 months ago
Solved

Develop Power Query outside Power BI or Excel

Dear all,   I came across this Reddit post, and I'm interested in hearing what the Power Query community actually thinks about it. The answers to the post basically claim that Power Query isn't bu...
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  • cengizhanarslan's avatar
    cengizhanarslan
    4 months ago

    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.

  • v-aatheeque's avatar
    v-aatheeque
    4 months ago

    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.

     

Lajouac's avatar
Lajouac
Advocate I
4 months ago

Thanks!

 

I am far below a million rows. If I have 100k, that would be the maximum I think.

Regarding your other points, I am not sure if I get them all, but I may sometimes have several consecutive queries, like 10 different queries to give me one final table. But I don't think this is too complex.

v-aatheeque's avatar
v-aatheeque
Community Support
4 months ago

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.