Excel University Blog
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Power Query
I love PivotTables, and use them all the time. But, when our needs are simple, we can easily summarize data with a Get & Transform query instead. Why? To simplify our workbooks and improve our efficiency. Let me demonstrate. Objective Before we dig into the mechanics, let’s just be clear about our goal. Let’s say…
Do you love FlashFill? Do you love Get & Transform queries? If so, you’ll love the most recent Excel update pushed out by Microsoft: New Column by Example. It is essentially FlashFill inside PowerQuery. It is way cool. Check it out. Objective Let’s say we have some data. It doesn’t matter where it is, it…
Imagine this scenario: There are 120 CSV files in a folder on your network. Each CSV export contains the transactions for a single month, and there are 10 years’ worth of files. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to combine all of the transactions in these 120 files into a single Excel…
Recently, I’ve been on this kick of using Get & Transform queries to accomplish tasks that we previously performed with other methods. It is clear that the Get & Transform commands provide new ways to solve old problem. In this post, I’ll demonstrate how we can use a Get & Transform query to transpose values.…
Alright my friends, this week I’ll tackle a question I received about retrieving values from workbooks. Here is the basic idea of the question. I have a folder with several hundred workbooks, and each workbook may contain any number of worksheets. For example, some workbooks have two sheets, some have three sheets, and some have…
I recently received a question about how to find the most recent transaction date of a list of items. There are a few fun ways to accomplish this, and so I thought I’d walk through three options. Thanks Darrell for your question! Objective The exact question from Darrell is: “I have a data table of…
In this post, we’ll use a Get & Transform query to help with our reconciliation. The idea for this post came from a question from Laura (thanks Laura!) The basic idea is that we have two worksheets. One contains the invoice totals and the other contains line item details, where there are many line items per…
Let’s say you have several data tables, and you need to combine them into a single table. One option would be to copy and paste to append them. But, depending on how many data tables there are, this type of manual process can be tedious. In this post, we’ll use a Get & Transform query…
Sometimes, our data has multiple delimiters. Finding the first delimiter with formulas has been pretty easy over the years. Finding the final delimiter hasn’t been as easy…until now. In this post, we’ll use a Get & Transform query to grab the characters after the last delimiter. Objective Before we jump into the mechanics, let’s be clear about…
Since many of Excel’s features are designed to work with data stored in a flat, tabular format, we sometimes need to flatten data that is received in other formats. In a previous post, we discussed a manual way to flatten data. In this post, we’ll use a Get & Transform Query as an alternative to…