Excel Archives – Page 8 of 12

Automatical or Bulk- Rename Columns in Power BI and Power Query

2017-03-142017-01-30 by Admin

Edit 7th Feb 2017: Friendly reader Roknic pointed out in the comments below that there’s actually an existing function for it in M: Table.TransformColumnNames 🙂

So the first of my example below would actually look like this:

Table.TransformColumnNames(Source, each Text.Replace(_, " ", "_"))

But still keeping my original post here, as the transformations in them might help for other use cases:

If you want to rename all of your table’s columns with a common rule, like “replace all spaces by underscore” or just “delete all spaces”, check out this easy method:

The above formula will replace all spaces (” “) by underscores (“_”).

How does it work:

The 2nd argument in the Table.RenameColumns-formula is a list of lists, just like in Table.TransformColumnType from this article. So we apply the same technique here: List.Transform transforms a single element from a list into a list-item, whose 2nd argument will be calculated with a Text.Replace-function.

Variations:

Only replace FirstN or LastN elements from the column names:

Conditions in FirstN, LastN and other xN-functions in M, PowerBI and Power Query

2017-01-242017-01-23 by Admin

Today I discovered that we can use conditions in many of the N-selecting functions where one/I would normally expect just a number-expression for the N: Table.RemoveFirstN( table as table, optional countOrCondition as any) So apart from being able to select a certain number of rows to be removed, we can pass a condition (as function). This condition will … Read more

Comfort Functions for Easy Profit & Loss statements in Power BI and Excel – Part2

2017-11-042017-01-23 by Admin

Here comes some long awaited comfort functions for part 2 of my easy P&L series. In the first section I’ve presented the general principle on how to work with a structure using an accounts-group-table. Today I will present 2 alternatives to define the reports without specifying single accounts. So if a new accounts are added to the chart of accounts, you don’t have to adjust your report definitions: Just make sure that to fill in all the fields in your account-group-table and you’re ready to go 🙂

No need to specify single accounts

So you only need to adjust your report definitions if you add new group items. If that’s still too much, take the 2nd solution, which will even eliminate that requirement:

Individual Account Layout: Just define each subtotal and determine for which subtotals single accounts shall be shown

No more specification of individual accounts

How to use it:

2. Ultrashort Account Layout: Further simplification of just defining the groups (hierarchy) that shall be shown (with option to filter on one of them)

No need to define individual group items

How to use it:

So these 2 different layouts will both produce the same reports incl. all accounts – just like in the first example. So you can choose which layout-style suits you best – actually, you can use all 3 in parallel. You just have to make sure to grab your pivot-rows from the correct tables and in Excel to grab the matching measures, as they all have their own bridge-tables (which need to be used in the measures):

How it works

Easy Profit & Loss (and other account) statements in PowerBI and Excel – Part2

2017-01-232017-01-16 by Admin

Welcome to part 2 of my series of easy Profit & Loss and other account statements in Power BI and Excel. In the first part I introduced the general principle of creating asymmetric shaped reports who use just one measure per column (you should have read this article in order to understand this post here).

How the technique works

This technique capitalises the aggregation power of the Vertipaq engine and creates a bridge-table between your DimAccount-table and the ReportsAccountsLayout-table. In there for every line of your report, all accounts that belong to the (sub-)totals are matched (“AccountsAllocation”). This table can get very long, but the engine can handle this easily:

Different use case: Account-groups-tables

In the first example we’ve worked with a chart of accounts, which had a parent-chield-hierarchy defining all the subtotals of the report. In this example we’re working with a different setup, using the good old DimAccountsGroups-table. Just one row per account and the columns are coming in pairs, containing the group-criteria and the sort-order for the report:

Individual Report-Layout

We also need a second table (ReportsAccountsLayout) that holds the definitions of the report-layouts like this:

Dynamic & bulk type transformation in Power Query, Power BI and M

2017-01-09 by Admin

This is just a quick code-share-of-the-day of different scenarios for dynamic type transformation of multiple columns at once. The syntax to transform the format of 2 columns (“Column1” and “Column2”) in a table (“Source”) looks like this: Now if you would like to do one of the following: 1. Force all columns of the table to … Read more

Easy Profit and Loss and other (account) scheme reports in Power BI and Power Pivot using DAX

2017-03-062016-07-21 by Admin

This is about an easy way to create typical finance reports like Profit and Loss using DAX that (unlike all other solutions I’ve come across so far) can be handled with very basic knowledge of this language like this:

The trick

The trick that makes my solution so easy lies in the fact that it requires no aggregation functions of the output-mediums like:

pivot-tables: who struggle with asymetric logic and are not available in Power BI so far
cubefunctions: who are not available in PowerBI so far

So we have to build the details as well as all aggregations into the solution as it is and don’t rely on/use any aggregation functions (This means for Excel: We have to turn off subtotals as well as totals in our pivot tables. It means for Power BI: Hurray! Finally a solution where the lack of pivot-tables doesn’t matter).

How to

The aim is to create a table/matrix with (account) details and aggregations into the rows and different slices of time-Intervalls or comparisons into the column sections. As for the columns, this will be covered by measures like [Actuals], [Budget], [PreviousPeriods], [Differences in all shapes…]. And – as the values in the columns should be the same – I’d prefer to use only one measure per column – that is fully sliceable and works on all (sub-) totals of course. … Ok – so some dreams later I found it:

MyMagicMeasure := CALCULATE([StandardMeasure], AccountsAllocation)

So you just wrap simple measures like Act=SUM(Fact[Amount]), Plan=SUM(Plan[Amount]), DiffPlan_Act=[Plan]-[Act] … into the CALCULATE together with the bridge-table as the filter-argument:

This is the many2many-technique in it’s simplest form (PostFromMarcoRusso). It all goes via simple aggregation on all accounts found in the filter context:

Our bridge-table “AccountsAllocation” consists of one account number per simple account and has multiple rows for the (sub-)totals – being all accounts that belong to them:

The ConsKey stands for the row in our report (1) and the AccountKey_ holds the account numbers that are going to be aggregated (many (for the sub-totals) and 1 for the account-rows). So all we need is this unique and simple aggregation on AccountKey for every row in the report – with a filter from the Reports-table via our bridge table to the DimAccounts, who then filters our FactTables: 1 -> many -> 1 -> many.