Power Query: Steps to Take – Part 1
14 September 2022
Welcome to our Power Query blog. This week, I am going to look at a worked example.
The tent business has a new administrative assistant, who used to work in the United States. George has provided some information, but it’s not yet in a format I can use:
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I start in the usual way, by choosing ‘From Table/Range’ in the ‘Get & Transform’ section of the Data tab. This gives me my initial query:
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There are of course many ways I can transform this data, but I will begin by establishing a link so that I can keep track of which rows relate to each other. I commence by right-clicking on Column1, and choosing to ‘Replace Values’:
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The phrase ‘salespeople available’ is no use to me, so I replace this value with null.
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I can now choose ‘Fill’ and then ‘Down’ from the right-click menu for Column1.
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My rows are now linked by month; I rename the column Month for clarity.
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I rename this query Base. I then make a Reference copy of Base.
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I call this query Quantities. I only want the rows pertaining to quantities. I would like to use text filters, but to do this I need to change the data type of week 1 to Text:
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If I click on the filter arrow next to the title, I can use the ‘Does Not Contain’ filter:
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I select those rows that don’t contain a forward slash (/).
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This gives me the rows pertaining to quantity only.
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Next time, I will create another query for the date information.
Come back next time for more ways to use Power Query!