The April 2016 Power Query Update was just released for Office 365 subscribers, and I can confirm that it is available to the First Release customers, as I’ve already got it installed. (If you’re on a later branch it may be a bit longer.) It’s also available for download for Excel 2010/2013 customers.
WARNING TO EXCEL 2016 USERS!!
If you read Power Query data from named ranges, I HIGHLY recommend that you avoid updating your software to the newest release right now if you can. The latest builds on the insider track have caused a rather large issue if you are sourcing from a named range that doesn’t have an equal offset of rows/column. I.e. if your source range doesn’t start in A1, B2, C3, D4, etc… then it pulls the wrong range. Tables are fine, named ranges are the issue. Microsoft knows, has architected a fix, but it hasn’t been pushed out yet. I’ll update this as soon as it has.
The problem is not an issue in Excel 2010/2013 running version 2.29.x or the current 2.30.x. It is only affecting Excel 2016.
UPDATED 2016-04-21: I can confirm that this issue was fixed in Excel 2016 16.0.6868.2048.
What’s in the April 2016 Power Query update?
At first glance it doesn’t seem like a ton – only two that they are calling out – but I think that this will make a few people pretty happy.
ODBC Connectivity Improvement
The first is that they’ve added the ability to easily select from a list of a available DSN’s when you’re setting up a Power Query connection against an ODBC data source. No new functionality there, but it saves you the headache of having to manually enter the connection string (which you can still do if needed.)
Image scooped from the Official Excel blog.
Ability to specify CSV column delimiters
We can now specify the type of delimiter for a CSV, including special characters:
Both small things, but should be quite impactful to the folks who need them.
