Is there any way to invoke PowerQuery/M outside of Excel or PowerBI?

Question

Our BI team is really growing to like the Power Query ETL tool used within Excel and Power BI. The functional language M/PowerQuery has great utility and it would be nice to be able to utilize outside of the context of PowerBI.

Is there or are there plans for exposing "M" as a stand-alone module, callable form the likes of c# or PowerShell?

Answer 1

• It is possible with the help of Power Query SDK.

• It has enabled projects such as PowerQueryNet, which can also execute the M PowerQuery expressions programmatically.

• Though you should keep in mind regarding PowerQueryNet which achieved through the use of undocumented APIs and in a commercial setup, may violate the Power BI / Power Query EULA. 

• I'm currently working to put this into a docker container which receives M via REST and returns data in the format requested (JSON/CSV/XML).

• It's also an interesting insight into how under-funded Microsoft software development might be, or how little Microsoft they realize the value of Power BI / Power Query: it enables savvy business users who know their data best to do hefty data transformations with Office apps already installed on their computers - a massive step forward.