Ben Gribaudo
If you’ve defined joins for any length of time, you’re likely familiar with left, inner and full joins, and perhaps even right joins (opposite of a left join). But these aren’t the only kinds of joins out there. There are several others which, while their names may not be as familiar, still have...
Ben Gribaudo
Power Query dataflows like to use GUIDs to reference workspaces, lakehouses and warehouses. With a GUID reference, you are authoritatively referencing a specific resource, which is good…but working with GUIDs can entail complications, both for humans and CI/CD, which is not so good. I know...
Ben Gribaudo
How do you query out the possible label values of the choice columns (a.k.a. picklists or option sets) in a Dataverse/Power Apps table (entity) using Power Query? As part of building a dimension table, here’s what I came up with to answer this question. In addition to working with picklist...
Ben Gribaudo
Have a table, but want to change—to override or augment—some of its behaviors? Not a technique normally needed in day-to-day Power Query, but perhaps useful in certain special scenarios. Imagine that you are pulling a table containing many product rows from a data source. All works well, except...
Ben Gribaudo
Power Query’s column types can be confusing. You can create or ascribe a column with any type—regardless of the kind of values in the column—and Power Query won’t complain, nor will the values in the column be transformed to the specified type. On the other hand, use Power Query’s “change type”...
Ben Gribaudo
Type equality is an advanced—and also confusing—Power Query topic. Sometimes, equality comparisons between type values seem to work as intuitively expected; other times, they may not. What’s going on? Is it okay—is it safe—to use the equals operator between type values? But first: Why the...
Ben Gribaudo
Did you know that, by default, Power Query may round numbers differently than you learned in grade school? Unlike DAX, Microsoft Excel and Microsoft SQL Server, which use commercial rounding as their main or default approach to rounding, Power Query is different: it defaults to banker’s...