Power Query: Emerging from Merging
13 November 2019
Welcome to our Power Query blog. This week we look at extracting from merged Excel cells.
I have some data from John, one of my imaginary salespeople:
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John has almost followed the expected format, but he’s decided to merge the date cells instead of using auto fill. I need the date on each row. I begin by extracting the data to Power Query by using the ‘From Table’ option on the ‘Get & Transform’ section of the Data tab.
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I accept the defaults.
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I can sort out my data by using ‘Fill Down’ which is available from the ‘Transform’ tab or if I right click on a selected column, viz.
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I select ‘Fill’ and ‘Down’.
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The dates are now populated correctly. However, there are other ways that John likes to merge cells in Excel:
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In this case he’s merged ‘Contact 1’ and ‘Contact 2’ for two the dates, as well as merging the rows. I extract this data again into Power Query:
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I can see that the Contact 2 column is currently redundant, so I will remove it using the ‘Remove Columns’ option on the Home tab and create a new one.
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I can now fill down as before.
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I need to split Contact 1, so I use ‘Split Column’ from the ‘Transform’ tab.
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I split by delimiter, but I need to create two new columns, not three, so I won’t split for every occurrence of SPACE.
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I choose to split at the ‘Right-most delimiter’.
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Now I need to remove the ‘and’ from the names in Contact 1.1. There are several ways I can approach this. I can split the column again and delete the column with ‘and’. Another way is to create a custom column. In this example, I will use ‘Add Column by Examples’ on the ‘Add Column’ tab to see which method Power Query applies.
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After only one example, Power Query has opted to transform the column so that only the characters before the SPACE delimiter appear:
= TextBeforeDelimiter([Contact 1.1],"")
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I remove the column I no longer need and rename the contact information. I also reorder my data.
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I now have the data in a standard format so that I can append it to data from other salespeople.
Come back next time for more ways to use Power Query!