2020 was a tough year, but Power Query users have prevailed. A few weeks ago I published this survey to assess the business impact of Power Query. The results are now published in this Power BI report.
What we have learned?
The results show that on average users saved 30% of their work time thanks to Power Query (The total saved time was 76 days out of 250 working days in a year). While the basic user saved 22 days a year, the moderate user reaches ~2.7 times more saved days and gained a total of saved 60 days a year.
The average Power Query user saved $80K for his organization (compared to $372K that was reported in the survey two years ago). While the moderate Power Query users saved an average of $37K/year for their organization, the advanced Power Query users saved money ~2.3 times more and reached $87K/year.
When you divide the average saved dollars by the total saved days, you see that for each saved day, the basic user of Power Query (7 respondents) saved $1530/day; the moderate user (31 respondents) saved $890/day, the advanced user (57 respondents) saved $1870/day, and the Power Query M Ninja (10 respondents) saved $2180/day.
Finally, as a crowd intelligence exercise, I asked the respondents to estimate how many users use Power Query worldwide (Not just in their organization), and how many users are not using it, but can benefit from Power Query. Averaging all the respondents’ estimations, our crowd intelligence exercise estimates a total of 3.92M Power Query users, with a potential to reach 135M users. So, the adoption of Power Query is currently estimated as reaching 2.9% of its true potential. Of course, this is only based on guestimates, and shouldn’t be taken as a serious empiric valuation.
What does it tell us? If large organizations are currently utilizing only 2.9% of Power Query potential (as reflected by the adoption % estimated above), these organizations will save an average of $2.75M once Power Query will be fully adopted ($2.75M = $80K x 100/2.9).
For impact by industry, check out the report above and the table below:
I hope that these results will motivate you to improve your Power Query skills and spread the word about Power Query in your organization. To boost Power Query skills in your organization, you can consider sharing my book.
Subscribe to DataChant to get the Power BI report file of the report.
