Power BI

The full Table.ContainsAnywhere function for Power Query in Power BI and Excel

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In a previous post I introduced the concept of a function that searches for an occurrence of a character or string within all columns of a table. Here I share the full “Table.ContainsAnywhere” – function with parameters for many useful options.

Function parameters and options

  1.  The first parameter “MyTable” refers to the table to search through
  2.  The 2nd parameter “MySearchStrings” can be either a text field or a list of strings to be searched for. The function will take care of any of these cases automatically.
  3.  If the 2nd parameter is a list and this 3rd parameter is null or not speified, the function will return true if any of the list items is found within the table. But if set to “All”, all list items have to be found somewhere in the table for the function to return true.
  4.  By default, the search will be made in a case sensitive mode (as this is the default-mode in Power Query). But any entry into the 4th function parameter will turn this to a case insensitive mode instead.
  5.  By default, the string or list entry has to match fully with any entry in the table. Again, any entry in the 5th parameter swaps that to a partial match.

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Bug in Power BI R Scripts “package … was installed with different internals”

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Today I spent many hours hunting an R-script error in Power BI and before Steph Locke came up with a solution for this, I came across a couple of posts and heard of other people, having the same problem. This blogpost is to make distribution of the solution a bit easier and to hopefully to help other folks with the same problem in the future.

The Problem

When running R-scripts in Power BI, I got all sorts of error-messages who all had one thing in common: They were complaining about one or more packages being installed by an R version with different internals.

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A new Table.ContainsAnywhere function for Power Query in Power BI and Excel

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The native Table.Contains-function in Power Query tells you if one or more strings are included in one or more of its columns. But you have to be specific about which strings you search in which column. But what to do if you want to search a string in all of its columns instead? Use my new Table.ContainsAnywhere function.

Problem

In the native function, you have to pass in a record with search term and column name. So if you search for “blue” in column “Description”, your formula would look like so:

Table.Contains( YourTableName, [Description = "blue"] )

But that’s not what I want in this case. I want the formula to search through all columns within the table for the occurrence of “blue”.

Solution

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How to cancel your Power Query refreshes fast in Power BI and Excel

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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:

Step-by-step-instruction

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Easy way to retrieve Teams data in Power BI via Flow (and other data from the Graph)

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In a previous post I’ve described how to use a custom connector to retrieve data from the Microsoft Graph API. But this requires to register an App and adjusting the M-code in the connector itself requires some M-knowledge. So I thought it might be a good idea to share an alternative method to retrieve data from Teams for example, that works out-of-the-box. There are a couple of endpoints supported currently:

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Query folding on JoinKind.Inner gotcha for Power BI and Power Query

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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:

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