Posts in Category ‘Excel’

Unravel cumulative totals to their initial elements in Power BI and Power Query

Recently I came across an interesting request where someone wanted to un-cumulate their quarterly YTD-figures (green) into their single quarters values (red) like so (“Unravel cumulative totals”):

Task

Retrieve every Quarters Amount from the Quarter To Date values (“YAmount”)

Method

To retrieve this value, one would have to start with the first value in the year. This is also the value of the first quarter, but for the 2nd quarter, one would have to deduct the value of the first quarter from the cumulative value of the 2nd quarter. So basically retrieving the previous cumulative row and deduct it from the current cumulative row. Do this for every row, unless it’s the start of the year or belongs to a different account code in this example:

Grab previous cumulative values, but only within the valid ranges

(Although for the data given in the sample, it would be sufficient to just take the year as a discriminator, but to be on the save side, I would suggest to include the different accounts as well)

Solution

Fortunately I’ve already written a function to grab the previous rows with lots of bells and whistles, that also includes the option to include grouping parameters. So if you copy the function code to the advanced editor of an empty query and name this “fnGetPreviousRow”, you just have to add a new step with the following code:

fnGetPreviousRow(#"Changed Type", null, {"YAmount"}, {"Account code", "Year"}, null, null)

Add a step to call this function (don’t go via “Add a column” here !!)

Call function (Previous stepname: red, Amount column: yellow, Grouping columns: green)

 

This will retrieve the previous row from the cumulative “YAmount” within every combination of “Account code” & “Year” and fill in nulls in the respective first rows. So when you then add another column that subtracts the new Value from the CumTotal, you will retrieve nulls for the first rows. This is not the desired outcome and I suggest to go back to the previous step -> check the “YAmount.Prev”-column and replace “null” by “0”. After that the calculation returns the correct result:

Result with single quarterly values (“Unravel cumulative totals”)

File to download

You can download the file to follow the steps:  Unravel cumulative or running totals

Enjoy & stay qeryious 😉

Comparing Table.AlternateRows with List.Alternate in Power BI and Power Query

I must admit that I had more than one unsuccessful attempt to try to fully understand how the List.Alternate-function works. What helped me at the end, was the function Table.AlternateRows. It pretends to be similar to List.Alternate, but holds some surprises that I will uncover in this blogpost:

How Table.Alternate works

Say I have the table below and want to retrieve just the letters that appear in every 2nd row:

Table.Alternate – Remove every other row

I find the dialogue that appears very helpful and intuitive:

It clearly is a removal operation and here I want to remove the 1st row from my table (“1”), and just one at a time. Also want to keep just one row (“A”) before the next one is removed (“2”)  and so on.

In the formula bar, this step will be translated into this M-code:

Table.AlternateRows(Source,0,1,1)

If you would have expected it to be translated to: Table.AlternateRows(Source,1,1,1) instead, you might have forgotten that the M-language in Power Query starts to count at 0, so the first row to remove is expressed by the 0 here.

List.Alternate should work similar

So if my input is a list instead of a table like below, I should expect a similar result than the sample above if I tweak the code a bit, shouldn’t I?

List.Alternate – produces a different result

But hey: What’s wrong here? Not a single element has been removed from the list !!

So let’s have a look into the documentation:

List.Alternate – Function Documentation

and compare it with the Table.AlternateRows documentation:

Table.AlternateRows – Function Documentation

Hm – at least we have one match here: The “offset” parameter is included in both functions. But it is the first (number) parameter in the Table-function and is at the last position in the List-function. So let’s move it around then like this:

List.Alternate – same result with different parameter order

There we are 🙂

So the order of the function parameters is different here. Also the other parameter names are different and their description. I find them much easier to understand in the Table function and of course, the function dialogue there helps to understand what shall happen as well.

Enjoy & stay queryious 😉

How to do a real VLOOKUP (false) in Power Query or Power BI

When you merge tables with distinct keys in Power Query you will get the same result than the VLOOKUP-function in Excel returns (if this is new to you, check out this article for example: https://www.myonlinetraininghub.com/excel-power-query-vlookup) .

But how to retrieve only the result of the first row, if the lookup-table has multiple rows with the same key?

 

Background

Say you have a dimension table for products:

Product table with one row per Product

 

 

 

 

and a transaction table with multiple entries per product:

Transactions table with multiple rows per Product

 

 

 

 

 

The task is to create 2 additional columns in your dimension table. One to show the first price at which the product has been sold and the other one the corresponding first date:

Select only first rows per Product

If you merge the transactions to the dimension table and expand it, you will end up with as much rows in the dimension table as there are in transaction table.

Problem

So how to retrieve only the elements of the first row of the matching tables? I’ll show you 2 different methods:

Solution 1 – Tweak the aggregation code

This is very quick to implement if you just want to return one or a few columns from the lookup-table: In the dialogue where you usually expand the columns, check “Aggregate” instead and click on one of the suggested aggregations for each column that I’m interested in (I simply ignore for a moment that these are not the aggregations that I actually need):

Choose one (false) aggregate per column

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now I tweak the code in the formula bar like so:

Tweaking Code for real VLOOKUP

Replacing the default aggregations by what I need (in red: List.First) and adjusting the column names directly in that command (in green: just to save one manual step later).

To avoid long query durations on large tables, you can transform the key column of the dimension table to a real key column, like Chris Webb has described here: https://blog.crossjoin.co.uk/2018/03/16/improving-the-performance-of-aggregation-after-a-merge-in-power-bi-and-excel-power-query-gettransform/

Solution 2 – Add a column that selects the whole desired row

If you want to retrieve many more columns from your lookup table, the method above can become a bit tedious. Then it might be easier to add a column, that grabs the whole first row instead: Table.First would do that job:

Add a column to retrieve the full first (or last) row

Then simply expand out all fields that you need.

Bonus

You can use many different selection operations with this technique: So List.Last or Table.Last would give you the latest prices for example. This would actually be a more realistic use case here … and is the reason why I didn’t solve the original problem with just removing duplicates 😉 .

Enjoy and stay queryious 😉

Improve import of Excel sheets with empty rows and columns in Power Query and Power BI

When you import Excel sheets who have empty leading or trailing columns and rows (showing null-values), you can substantially improve the complexity and speed of your import process with a simple trick:

Remove the reasons for the empty trailing rows and columns 😉

Background

Usually, when you import data from an Excel sheet, Power Query will automatically detect the used range in a sheet and will just return those rows and columns who have content in it. So how can it come that in some cases, additional rows or columns are returned who have nothing but empty values in them?

Reason

The reason for it can be cell formatting of empty cells. They often occur in old workbooks where cells have been deleted. These cells will be returned with a null-value during the import process with Power Query. See this blogpost for more details of potential pitfalls that come with it.

Solution

The “Inquire” Excel Add-On lets you clean any excess cell formatting. After you’ve executed this command, Power Query will not import any of those leading or trailing empty rows or columns any more. Often this will reduce the file size of the Excel files dramatically as well.

Effects

You will benefit from:

  • simpler query logic
  • potentially huge improved import speed, due to the reduced file size

Enjoy and stay queryious 😉

Efficiently rename columns with a function in Power BI and Power Query

Edit 2018-July-05: As it turns out I’ve missed the native function that exists with exact the same functionality: Table.TransformColumnNames Thanks to Tristan Malherbe for pointing this out 🙂

But anyway: If you want to understand what it does and how you could have written it by yourself – read along:

The standard function to rename columns in the query editor of Power BI or Power Query is Table.RenameColumns. It takes a nested list of old and new column names as its second argument. But I often come across scenarios where I would like the new column names to be created dynamically. Therefore I’ve created a function (Table.RenameColumnsWithFunction) that takes a text transformation function as its argument instead of a hardcoded list of values:

Problem

Say you’re importing tables where the table name is part of each column name like so:

Old column names for Table.RenameColumnsWithFunction

 

 

But you only want to maintain everything after the TABLENAME.:

New column names for Table.RenameColumnsWithFunction

 

 

 

One way would be to replace “TABLENAME.” by nothing (“”):

Table.RenameColumnsWithFunction

This function allows you to pass the function as a second argument instead of a hardcoded list of new names like so:

Table.RenameColumnsWithFunction

 

 

 

 

 

As you can use any appropriate function, an alternative could also be to use is like this for example:

Table.RenameColumnsWithFunction( MyTable, each Text.BeforeDelimiter(_, ".")

So the underscore (_) stands for each column name of the table that you’re passing in as the 1st parameter of the function.

Function Code

If you don’t know how to handle custom functions, check out this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TQN6KPG74Q

How it works

Details to row numbers:

  • 4: The old column names are retrieved and returned as a list
  • 5: Each item from that list will be transformed with the transformation function that has been passed in as the 2nd parameter
  • 6: Both lists are zipped to be in the required shape for the native function “Table.RenameColumns”
  • 7: The native function “Table.RenameColumns” is applied to perform the desired renaming operation
  • 10 ff: This is just function documentation that will appear when you address this function in the program

Hope this will help you one day, so

enjoy & stay queryious 😉

Automatically create function record for Expression.Evaluate in Power BI and Power Query

Some time ago I wrote a blogpost on how to create a function library in Power BI or Power Query (http://www.thebiccountant.com/2017/08/27/how-to-create-and-use-r-function-library-in-power-bi/). There I also presented a way to pull that function code automatically from GitHub.

Problem

In that code I used the function Expression.Evaluate to execute the imported text and create functions from it. The inbuilt functions that I’ve used in that code have to be passed as an environment record at the end of the expression. I’ve used #shared for it, as this returns a record with all native M-functions and is quick and easy to write (if environments are new to you, check out this series: https://ssbi-blog.de/the-environment-concept-in-m-for-power-query-and-power-bi-desktop/ ). But as it turns out, this can cause problems when publishing to the service unfortunately (https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/ie/en-US/208b9365-91e9-4802-b737-de00bf027e2a/alternative-calling-function-with-text-string?forum=powerquery – please leave a vote if you would like to use #shared in the service as well).

Solution

Read more