Power Query: Steps to Take – Part 2

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:

Last time, I extracted the data and created a Base query.  I took a Reference copy of Base.     

This query was transformed and called Quantities:

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:

(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:

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. 

I have further work to do on Dates, as the dates themselves do not look quite right: they are certainly not consistent. 

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!