Viewing and analyzing M functions

Every time you click on a button to to any of Power BI Desktop's supported data or apply any transformation to a data source object, such as changing a column's data type, one or multiple M expressions are created reflecting your choices. These M expressions are automatically written to dedicated M documents and, if saved, are stored within the Power BI Desktop file as Queries. M is a functional programming language like F#, and it's important that Power BI developers become familiar with analyzing and later writing and enhancing the M code that supports their queries.

Getting ready

1. Build a query through the user interface that connects to the AdventureWorksDW2016CTP3 SQL Server database on the ATLAS server and retrieves the DimGeography table, filtered by United States for English.
2. Click on Get Data from the Home tab of the ribbon, select SQL Server from the list of database sources, and the server and names.
   • For the Data Connectivity mode, select Import...