Power Query: Unique and Distinct
25 March 2020
Welcome to our Power Query blog. This week, I look at how to find the unique or distinct values in a list of data.
I have a list of data, and I want to find the values that occur once only.
![](http://sumproduct-4634.kxcdn.com/img/containers/main/blog-pictures/2020/power-query/173/image1.png/e774d10cbbb9450fc45efbe51abdf434.jpg)
My first step is to extract my data to Power Query using the ‘From Table’ option in the ‘Get & Transform section of the Data tab.
![](http://sumproduct-4634.kxcdn.com/img/containers/main/blog-pictures/2020/power-query/173/image2.png/f32e5a15e2cf9c3e4d2d058458ce054d.jpg)
I begin by using the ‘Group By’ feature on the Transform tab.
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I can accept the defaults:
![](http://sumproduct-4634.kxcdn.com/img/containers/main/blog-pictures/2020/power-query/173/image4.png/72aa864d2854c6fefb1083fba0ab5792.jpg)
This will count the number of times each Data value appears.
![](http://sumproduct-4634.kxcdn.com/img/containers/main/blog-pictures/2020/power-query/173/image5.png/36776d1da4d05b45bb5a5d09375f407c.jpg)
I only want to see the Data values that appear once. I can do this by filtering Count.
![](http://sumproduct-4634.kxcdn.com/img/containers/main/blog-pictures/2020/power-query/173/image6.png/23912d3b1671861e02bebcd5183f1607.jpg)
I click OK to see my unique data:
![](http://sumproduct-4634.kxcdn.com/img/containers/main/blog-pictures/2020/power-query/173/image7.png/6f49c288a0d88a66b427eaf4ece923d6.jpg)
I can also find the distinct values from my original data. I start from the original data again.
![](http://sumproduct-4634.kxcdn.com/img/containers/main/blog-pictures/2020/power-query/173/image8.png/b9ee28d90e6b5bc92ea4aeafdad51628.jpg)
This time, I can right click on my column to find the distinct values.
![](http://sumproduct-4634.kxcdn.com/img/containers/main/blog-pictures/2020/power-query/173/image9.png/0485ccbc83bdeec1d741bad442a1ea5f.jpg)
I remove the duplicates:
![](http://sumproduct-4634.kxcdn.com/img/containers/main/blog-pictures/2020/power-query/173/image10.png/daf8c4f0259ce428269c0d3d4badd32b.jpg)
I can see that I now have 99 distinct values out of the original 500 rows.
Come back next time for more ways to use Power Query!