I've been playing around with PowerQuery in Excel to do some ETL work. It's pretty nifty and goes a lot farther than Excel used to, and in many ways it's bette

I've been playing around with PowerQuery in Excel to do some ETL work. It's pretty nifty and goes a lot farther than Excel used to, and in many ways it's better than other tools I've used. And yet... To do a few things I consider basic, you need to write nontrivial code. The two examples recently: 1. To strip non-digits from phone numbers, I needed to edit a step in the query by hand to add Text. Select. It doesn't seem to be accessible from the GUI. 2. To roll three columns up into one by replacing nulls with values from the next column, I had to write a lambda for List.Accumulate. Again, not available in the GUI, and probably not something a low-code user could hack. I think they'd have to pull it into Excel and then use a long IF formula to get there. Low code can also be really slow when you think it's just gotta do what you want, but it doesn't, and you need to code it. However, a good platform can get the annoying bits out of the way, and the auto-preview features the platforms usually have are great.