Posts in Category ‘Excel’

DAX CALCULATE Debugger

CALCULATE is the most powerful function in DAX, as it allows you to change the filter context under which its expression is evaluated to your hearts content. But with big number of options to choose from, often comes big frustration when the results don’t match expectations. Often this is because your syntax to modify the filter context doesn’t do what you’ve intended. Unfortunately CALCULATE only displays its result and not how it achieved it, so debugging becomes a challenge. This is where my CALCULATE Debugger measure can help out:

DAX CALCULATE Debugger

This is a measure that returns a text-value, showing the number of rows of the adjusted filter context table, the MIN and MAX value of the selected column as well as up to the first 10 values. Just place this measure beneath the CALCULATE-measure in question and try to find the error 😉

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The full Table.ContainsAnywhere function for Power Query in Power BI and Excel

In a previous post I introduced the concept of a function that searches for an occurrence of a character or string within all columns of a table. Here I share the full “Table.ContainsAnywhere” – function with parameters for many useful options.

Function parameters and options

  1.  The first parameter “MyTable” refers to the table to search through
  2.  The 2nd parameter “MySearchStrings” can be either a text field or a list of strings to be searched for. The function will take care of any of these cases automatically.
  3.  If the 2nd parameter is a list and this 3rd parameter is null or not speified, the function will return true if any of the list items is found within the table. But if set to “All”, all list items have to be found somewhere in the table for the function to return true.
  4.  By default, the search will be made in a case sensitive mode (as this is the default-mode in Power Query). But any entry into the 4th function parameter will turn this to a case insensitive mode instead.
  5.  By default, the string or list entry has to match fully with any entry in the table. Again, any entry in the 5th parameter swaps that to a partial match.

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A new Table.ContainsAnywhere function for Power Query in Power BI and Excel

The native Table.Contains-function in Power Query tells you if one or more strings are included in one or more of its columns. But you have to be specific about which strings you search in which column. But what to do if you want to search a string in all of its columns instead? Use my new Table.ContainsAnywhere function.

Problem

In the native function, you have to pass in a record with search term and column name. So if you search for “blue” in column “Description”, your formula would look like so:

Table.Contains( YourTableName, [Description = "blue"] )

But that’s not what I want in this case. I want the formula to search through all columns within the table for the occurrence of “blue”.

Solution

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Bulk-extract Power Query M-code from multiple Excel files at once

Some time ago I published a function that extracts all M-code from Power BI (.pbix)-files. Today I publish the pendant to Bulk-extract Power Query M-code from multiple Excel-files at once. The code contains many elements from the before mentioned, so please refer to that article for reference.

How to use

The function below has just one parameter where you either fill in a full filename (incl. path) of an Excel file, or a folder path where multiple files reside. The function will automatically detect the right modus and spit out the M-code. Read more