Have you ever wanted to do a specific type of filter that might be too specific to do with just the regular filter drop down or even the advanced filter operations in Excel?
Let me give you an example of one of those scenarios. Imagine that you have a table like the following:
Have you ever had a similar situation where a REALLY important value of the file is in either a header or a footer section? Let me give you a clear example with the following file:
In the image above you’ll see that we have 2 values in the header section right under the logo of my company. Now, this is a PDF file, so we’ll connect to that PDF file, get the data underneath those header values (which is basically a table) and then create a new column specifically for the value of the Sales Group. You can imagine that I have a bunch of PDF files in a folder and each of those PDF files is for a specific Sales Group, so I need to have that value as a new column.
A couple of things have happened within the last few days. In short:
That’s A LOT of info to digest, but let’s get right into it.
As you may already know, Ken Puls and myself wrote a book called ‘M is for Data Monkey’ almost 3 years ago and we’ve been working thoroughly on the 2nd edition of that to keep the content up to date and relevant.
We’ve got some news to share with you guys about the development of this book and when it’ll arrive to your favorite book store. Before we get into the this, we would like to cover some aspects as to why it has taken us so far to release this book.
A lot of things have happened in the last couple of days. I’m for the first time in my life in Seattle spending some quality time with people that I’ve never met in my life other than through the power of the internet. It’s a nice feeling to finally put a face to a name that you always see on your inbox.
I’ll be speaking later today, but I had to get this post out to the world as soon as possible.
I’ve covered the new Web Scraping experience before in here, and talking with the product team today at the Business Applications Summit they (Ehren specifically) told me that they just updated and improved the experience, so he showed me a demo and I took home my homework so I could implement what he showed me on my own dataset
Recursive functions are a topic that I rarely come across.
To give you some perspective, the instances that I’ve needed recursive functions can be counted with just 1 hand.
This is one of those situations where a recursive function is probably the best way to go.
Big thanks to NicoPer who posted this question on the Official Microsoft Power Query forum.
Motivated by one of the latest videos from the MSFT guys behind Guy in a cube:
where they talk about one of the hidden secrets behind Power Query / Power BI, I wanted to talk about another one of those hidden gems inside Power Query / Power BI that is not completely visible or intuitive for most folks when they start using the tool.
Hey! This will be a short post just to let you all know that I’ll be speaking for the first time ever in a US based event later this July – the Microsoft Business Applications Summit 2018 Here’s an excerpt of my session (level 200): The Name of the session: Alberto Ferrari used to do […]
The latest version of Power BI Desktop came out with a new Web Connector specifically designed for Web Scraping Scenarios. in this blog post I’ll try to go deep into how this new experience works and how you can take advantage of it.
Before we move forward, you’re gonna need the latest version of Power BI Desktop (May 2018 for me) and also enable the Preview feature in the Options window:
I want to find out how many books are out there that have anything to do with Power Query. I want the reviews that go with them, the name of the authors, when they were released and, of course, the names of these books.
The best place to find this information is probably Amazon. So I went on Amazon and did a quick search using the keywords “power query”.
Power BI just recently released the ability to set up Incremental refresh policies through the Power BI Desktop.
This is a short blog post with my first thoughts on it.
Everybody has been excited about the possibility of doing Incremental Refresh through Power BI. Back in the day, this was only something that you could accomplish using Partitions in SSAS, which would require a server and it didn’t use M syntax at all.
Recently there have been new releases like Azure Analysis Services and new versions of Analysis Services that have Power Query integrated into it which allow for really dynamic M syntax. To this point, everything was through a SSAS but now we have the ability to basically create partitions through a Power BI Desktop model.
I not only wanted to test this out by itself, but by combining it with my Custom Connectors. Could I create a scenario where I’m getting data from the WooCommerce API (using my Custom Connector from here) and set up an incremental refresh?
Let’s find out.
I’ve been working with Power Query inside of Excel and Power BI for the past few years, but I’ve always tried to stay on top of its competitors, trying to make sure that I’m investing my time using the best tool that there is.
This is one of those times where I allocate some time to find out if Power Query is still the best ETL tool for the Business Analyst out there.
In this case I’m going to compare 3 tools:
Disclaimer: I am in no way being sponsored nor promoted by any of these companies. I’m not a Microsoft MVP nor a Tableau Zen Master. My main goal with this comparison is to find the best ETL tool out there and use it.
These are GREAT news! Finally we have a way to refresh data from custom connectors on the Power BI service.
Surprise! You can now refresh custom connectors through the Power BI personal gateway (requires April 2018 version) https://t.co/SUF4CEuQBA#pqsdk
— Matt Masson (@mattmasson) April 22, 2018
