Power Query is only a thing in Excel for Windows though, it’s likely it will eventually be replaced with something cross platform. And if you don’t want to make .NET load every time you open your workbook, you have this.
That doesn't sound like a reason to me. What in the fundamental nature of Power Query prevents it from being cross platform? Or, conversely, what prevents something new that is cross platform from working basically the same as Power Query if it must be strictly incompatible?
It's possible we're not talking about the same thing. Microsoft has slapped "Power" on so many different things. When I google "Power Query" I get a lot of "Power BI" stuff and I try to avoid that like the plague. In my limited experience, it's flaky, unstable, and adds negative value to my reports.
From my perspective, Power Query appears to be similar to the scripting language in something like Qlikview. Except much less painful (for me). I also think "grokking" Power Query could lead to improving SQL, even. The split between SQL and things like PL/SQL or T-SQL always felt wrong to me. Just having functions as a seamless part seems like the thing that was always missing.
I think it’s mostly Power Query (the thing in excel that pops up when you click “Get and Transform Data” is what I’m talking about) requires .NET 4 at the moment, which means that they’d need to get it on .NET Core to get it on the Mac, and then would still have no way to get it on the web and on mobile. It’s a serious pain point for cross platform compatibility in Excel at the moment, but I concur with you that we need to keep it or something similar around (especially since Microsoft keeps dragging their feet on adding first class support for a scripting language that isn’t VBA).
