M

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

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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

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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:

  1. 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:

How to use Individual Report Layout

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:

How to use Ultrashort Layout

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

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

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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

Advanced type detection in Power BI and Power Query: Table.ClassifyMixedColumnTypes

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This is not a proper blogpost, just a quick share of a function I’ve created today which I think will be very useful for others as well: Automatic type detection will assign only one type to a column, but sometimes there are multiple types in it and then the type “any” will be applied, which means no … Read more

Multiple replacements or translations in Power BI and Power Query

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A common task when cleaning data is to perform multiple replacements at once. When dealing with “translation tables” you might have come across Chris Webb’s solution using List.Generate to deal with this. This works fine – but might deliver unexpected results if you don’t consider it’s implications properly. Say we add lines like shown below, then we might expect the result as highlighted in yellow:

Image2
Multiple replacements using 2 different techniques

So hey – what happened here?: Our catamaran turns out as a bearamaran and the chair turns to chwater.

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