Happy Spreadsheet Day! (Or how to escape Excel-hell)

When reading horror-stories about Excel-hell describing how dangerous it is to use Excel in corporate environments, I cannot help but to think of this hilarious video describing the fatal consequences of acting without common sense: Just don’t do stupid things with it.

Although Excel comes nearly for free (in relation to what value it delivers) this doesn’t mean that you don’t need to invest in applying proper techniques (like in any other profession). There’s training and best practices for every different need.

But the best thing about Excel seems largely unknown still: Since the invention of Power Query it has never been easier to be save around Excel than before: A magic tool that can solve many of the problems that cause Excel hell: Repetitive tasks: The little adjustments and extensions that pile up when you use your workbook again and again and are often performed without realizing the (meanwhile complex) context of all the standard-Excel-elements involved: Power Query will prevent this mess. It will help you organize and automize your repetitive tasks in Excel.

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Create a Dimension Table with Power Query: Avoid the case sensitivity bug!

Creating a Dimension table from a fact table using Power Query is really straightforward using the Remove Duplicates function.

However – you might experience a problem if the key to your Dimension table that you’re extracting from the Fact table is text and not number format. Power Query is case sensitive and will consider “Car” and “car” as different, returning both after the remove duplicates step. Once you load this into your Power Pivot data model, it will be shown there as “Car” and “Car” or “car” and “car”, depending on which term was the first in the list (will always take the first one).

This further means that you will not be able to connect you new Dimension table to your Fact table as the Dimension table now has dups.

To overcome this (and because it might be good practice anyway):

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