Power Query: Steps to Take – Part 2
21 September 2022
Welcome to our Power Query blog. This week, I continue with my worked example by looking at dates.
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:
![](http://sumproduct-4634.kxcdn.com/img/containers/main/./image1-1662616954.png/9f1d49df9a60ef61547ee3714359aacf.jpg)
Last time, I extracted the data and created a Base query. I took a Reference copy of Base.
![](http://sumproduct-4634.kxcdn.com/img/containers/main/./image2-1662616963.png/18e02a2c3dfb5b099a530d8e00af3def.jpg)
This query was transformed and called Quantities:
![](http://sumproduct-4634.kxcdn.com/img/containers/main/./image3-1662616967.png/2d9436ed556cb999c2b5a21e20f06d4f.jpg)
This week, I will create another query for the date information. As I said last week, there are a number of approaches I could take for this. I could ‘Merge as New’ Base and Quantities and take the ‘Left Anti’ option:
![](http://sumproduct-4634.kxcdn.com/img/containers/main/./image4-1662616971.png/9668deb5c845b469f337efdec3c26ead.jpg)
(Note that to achieve this result I would first have to change the data type of week 1 of Base to Text.)
This would leave me with the rows of Base that are NOT in Quantities. Instead, for this example, I will make a Duplicate of Quantities:
![](http://sumproduct-4634.kxcdn.com/img/containers/main/./image5-1662616976.png/06b3ab83d7f433a26fdce820a790bcbe.jpg)
The reason I have taken a duplicate this time, is that I want to change one of the steps. I want to amend the ‘Filtered Rows’ step to filter those rows that do contain the forward slash (/). I also rename the duplicate query Dates.
![](http://sumproduct-4634.kxcdn.com/img/containers/main/./image6-1662617124.png/11c425472e9a91e8d60b30de58e5ef31.jpg)
I have further work to do on Dates, as the dates themselves do not look quite right: they are certainly not consistent.
![](http://sumproduct-4634.kxcdn.com/img/containers/main/./image7-1662617073.png/e21df34c06e9e2c4948344c93c65a947.jpg)
Next time, I will transform the data so that the dates are in the correct format for my region.
Come back next time for more ways to use Power Query!