E · P · Q · E

Excel Power Query Editor Edit Power Query M in VS Code — including in workbooks Excel already has open. No Excel automation to install, no COM to configure, no closing your file to save your work. Built by EWC3 Labs.

EWC3 Labs

Excel's Advanced Editor gives you one query at a time, in a modal dialog, with no version control and no real editor. This gives you your M code as files — in VS Code, with IntelliSense, multi-cursor, diff, blame, and everything else you already use.

Which means you can write and refactor Power Query M with GitHub Copilot, Claude, Cursor, or any other AI coding agent. That is what this was built for. An agent cannot drive a modal dialog inside Excel — but the moment your queries are .m files in your editor, every tool that works on files works on them: generating a query, explaining one somebody else wrote, refactoring twenty at once, reviewing a diff before it goes near the workbook.

It reads .xlsx, .xlsm and .xlsb directly. Excel does not need to be installed, which also means it works on macOS and Linux, and in CI.

New in 0.7.0 — write to a workbook that's open

The oldest complaint about tools like this: you edit your query, hit save, and get "the file is locked, close Excel and try again." So you close the workbook, sync, reopen it, find your place again, and lose your train of thought.

Turn on sync.liveWhenOpen and that stops happening. If Excel already has the workbook open, the change goes straight into it through Excel itself:

• The file on disk is not touched. Excel simply shows unsaved changes, exactly as if you'd typed them, and you save when you're ready.
• Queries you didn't touch are left alone. Identical M isn't rewritten, so nothing is marked dirty for no reason.
• A query in the workbook that isn't in your .m file is reported, never deleted.
• Workbook closed? It writes to the file as it always has. One decision, made per file, per save.

Live sync needs Windows and Excel, because it works by asking Excel to make the change. Yes: the extension that famously doesn't require Excel requires Excel to write to Excel while Excel has the file open. We're at peace with it.

Everything else still needs neither. Extract, edit, bulk-extract, and sync to closed workbooks all work on macOS and Linux with no Excel installed, exactly as they always have.

Requested by @namgaw, who wanted to stop closing his workbook to save his own query. Fair.

Beta. It works by talking to Excel through COM, and Excel varies enormously in the wild. It never writes your file, so the worst case is that it declines and the normal path takes over. See the changelog for what was measured to work and what has not been tried — and please report anything odd.

Quick start

1. Install — from the Marketplace, or ext install ewc3labs.excel-power-query-editor.

2. Extract — right-click any .xlsx / .xlsm / .xlsb → Extract Power Query. You get a .m file beside it with every query in the workbook.

3. Edit and sync — edit the .m, then right-click → Sync to Excel. Or turn on Watch and it syncs as you save.

That's the whole workflow. Nothing to configure to get started.

What it does

Your data

This extension writes to spreadsheets, and it treats that as the serious thing it is.

• A backup before every write, in a location you choose.
• Never edits in place — a failed write leaves the original untouched.
• Live sync doesn't write the file at all. It hands the change to Excel and leaves the saving to you.
• No telemetry. Nothing is collected, sent, or phoned home.

If you find a case where a workbook is damaged, that is the highest-priority bug this project can have. Open an issue and it goes to the front of the queue.

Configuration

Everything works out of the box. Common ones:

{
  // Write into the workbook when Excel already has it open (Windows + Excel)
  "excel-power-query-editor.sync.liveWhenOpen": true,

  // Sync automatically when you save the .m file
  "excel-power-query-editor.watch.always": true,

  // Keep backups next to the workbook, retaining the last 10
  "excel-power-query-editor.backup.location": "sameFolder",
  "excel-power-query-editor.backup.maxFiles": 10
}

Full reference: Config Reference.

Upgrading from 0.5.x? The settings were reorganized into namespaces (watchAlways → watch.always, and so on). Your existing settings are migrated automatically the first time 0.7.0 starts, and the old names remain documented as deprecated for a release.

Documentation

The docs are laid out the way Klipper lays out theirs: flat files, one document per feature, and a couple of references that enumerate everything. We run and mod Klipper here at EWC3 Labs, so when our own docs needed sorting out we shamelessly ~~stole~~ borrowed a structure we already knew worked. Thanks, Klipper community.

It earns its keep in a specific way: a feature arrives with its own document, so nobody has to edit a doc somebody else owns. The references don't rot either — Config Reference is generated from package.json, and CI fails the build on a dead link, a wrong-case link, or a document nothing links to.

• Overview — the documentation index
• User Guide — the full workflow
• Config Reference — every setting
• Commands — every command
• Live Sync — writing to an open workbook
• Config Changes — read this when upgrading

The references are generated and checked in CI by @ewc3labs/docs-tools, our own toolkit for keeping documentation from going stale. It is public, MIT, and has no dependencies, if you want it for your own repository.

• Live sync design — how writing to an open workbook works, and what was measured to make it reliable
• Contributing · Changelog · Support

Acknowledgments

This stands on other people's work:

• Vladinator — excel-datamashup, which does the genuinely hard part: reading and writing the DataMashup part inside a workbook.
• Alexander Malanov — EditExcelPQM, which showed this was possible.
• Ken Puls — whose Monkey Tools proved writing to an open workbook was a solved problem, from the other side of the same wall. Live sync exists because that removed the question of whether it could be done at all.
• @namgaw — who asked for live sync in [discussion #3]namgaw, and then pointed at Monkey Tools. The request was the easy part; the pointer is what unstuck it. This was a file-lock problem until it became an object-model problem.
• Microsoft — the Power Query / M language extension that provides the language service.
• The Klipper project — for a documentation structure good enough to be worth copying, and for a great deal else that has nothing to do with Excel.

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