Improve Cycle Times - Power Query Lint

Recently, I had an article published on SimpleTalk titled “13 Things I Wish I Knew About Power Query (When I First Started)”. When I first started using Power Query, I faced several trials and tribulations. Unsurprisingly, with the rapid adoption and growth of Power BI, many newcomers are learning the same lessons I did. Some consider this a rite of passage, and I admit that I held that view for years. However, after managing projects and teams, I realized I was doing a disservice to both my colleagues and our customers.

My team and I were repeatedly identifying potential issues and highlighting best practices manually, then educating staff on how to address them. While I enjoy discussing ways to improve Power BI work with my colleagues, I would rather focus on areas that require unique expertise, such as star schema modeling with row-level security (RLS). If my teams could understand best practices while they were working, they could identify potential issues sooner, saving time and ultimately delivering better data products to customers.

And if you’ve been following this blog over the years, you know I often talk about DataOps principles. The principle that kept pushing me on this matter was “Improve Cycle Times”.

We should strive to minimize the time and effort to turn a customer need into an analytic idea, create it in development, release it as a repeatable production process, and finally refactor and reuse that product.

That’s how the idea for Power Query Lint came to life. Linting is a term used in software development to describe tools that analyze code for errors, issues, and adherence to standards. We realized we needed a linting tool to help us improve our Power Query work across Excel, Power BI Desktop, and Dataflows. It allows us to identify and fix issues sooner rather than later. This tool has dramatically improved our newer team members’ understanding of Power Query and has helped keep me and more senior staff aligned with good practices.

As shown in the animated image below, you can copy the Power Query code from the Power Query Editor, paste it into the text area, hit the “Lint” button, and receive a list of issues and best practices within seconds. We also include links to further details about each issue or best practice, helping users learn how to address them effectively.

Figure 1 - Power Query Lint in action

We offer a free version that lets you lint 20 of the most common rules, so you can try it out today. For even more value, our paid version expands to over 80 rules and includes additional features designed to accelerate your Power Query work.

Stay tuned. Over the next couple of months, we will be adding more features, including the ability to lint Power Query directly within your DevOps pipelines.

As always, let me know your thoughts on LinkedIn or Twitter/X.