Introduction
Data transformation is a critical step in preparing raw data for analytics. Organizations often have team members with varying technical backgrounds, and not everyone is comfortable writing Spark or T-SQL code to shape data. A low-code approach that uses familiar tools can accelerate data preparation while maintaining quality and consistency.
Dataflows Gen2 in Microsoft Fabric provide a Power Query-based transformation experience that runs in the cloud. If you're comfortable with Power Query in Excel or Power BI Desktop, you already know the core interface. Dataflows Gen2 extend that experience to enterprise-scale data preparation, with the ability to load transformed data directly into lakehouses, warehouses, and other Fabric destinations.
Suppose you work at a retail organization that collects sales data from multiple regional systems. Your team needs to standardize, clean, and combine this data before analysts can build reports. Several team members are experienced Power Query users from their work in Excel and Power BI, and you want to use those skills for upstream data preparation. Dataflows let you create reusable transformation logic that runs on a schedule and delivers analytics-ready data to your lakehouse or warehouse.
In this module, you explore how dataflows work, from connecting to data sources and applying transformations to optimizing performance and loading results to Fabric destinations. By the end, you'll be ready to build dataflows that deliver clean, analytics-ready data to your lakehouse or warehouse. The well-structured data you produce also becomes part of the foundation that supports Copilot experiences and AI-driven insights across the platform.