If you’re working with large data or complex queries that take a long time refresh, cancelling one of those refreshes can even take longer time, especially, if the query has run for quite some time already.
Luckily, there is an easy trick to cancel refresh without loosing the work you’ve done already:
If you query databases who support query folding, you’re probably very aware of every step you take and check if folding happens with every new step like so:
“View Native Query” shows folding query that’s send back to the server (if not greyed out)
Folding will (usually) happen as long as “View Native Query” isn’t greyed out.
So when doing an inner join on tables whithin the same database, I was a bit surprised to see this greyed out actually. As according to the literature, it should fold.
But guess what? After I expanded a column from it, the folding was back again: Read more
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.
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
The following steps show how to create a new column in a table using existing custom function code. This works in Power BI as well as in Power Query in Excel:
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 😉
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?
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.
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.
You will benefit from:
Enjoy and stay queryious 😉
This is a quick walkthrough on how you can easily import multiple SharePoint lists at once, just like the import from folder method.
You start your import like this:
Pass the URL to the folder where your lists are located:
In the next step you would normally choose all the multiple SharePoint lists you want to import: