You may have seen Joseph Sirosh’s blog post last week about the ability to publish Azure Machine Learning models to the Azure Marketplace, and that MS have published a number of APIs there already. There’s a new Excel add-in that can be used with these APIs but I noticed that at least one of them, the Sentiment Analysis API, can be used direct from Power Query too.

To do this, the first thing you need to do is to go to the Azure Marketplace, sign in with your Microsoft account, and subscribe to the Lexicon Based Sentiment Analysis API. The docs say you get 25000 transactions free per month although there doesn’t appear to be a way to pay for more; that said the number of transactions remaining shown on my account kept resetting, so maybe there is no limit. The API itself is straightforward: pass it a sentence…