I know that this topic has been covered before by others, but I think it’s still pretty valuable for a user to be able to figure out what Power Query functions exist, especially since they are often different than what we’re used to in Excel.
Power Query Functions Documentation on the web
There’s a pretty good resource site available on the Microsoft Support site. Personally I have that one bookmarked and head over there often when I’m looking for a new function to do something. I find that with a quick CTRL + F on the page, I can quickly search and narrow in on the function I think I need in order to learn it’s syntax.
To be fair, I’m not always in love with the actual examples (many lack a power query UI view), but overall the site is fairly useful.
Power Query Functions Documentation in the client
Now that’s all good, but what if you’re working on a plane with no WIFI, and you need to figure out the syntax for a new function?
As luck has it, there is a way to pull up the list for most functions right in the client. To do this, I:
- Clicked Add Column –> Add Custom Column
- Typed a 1 and clicked OK
- Went to the Power Query formula bar and typed the formula below. (Notice that this is case sensitive)
=#shared
(Why the custom column? Because typing in the formula bar replaces the previous step, and I want to be able to revert to that since it’s part of my logic:
Now, you’ll see you get a list of (almost) all the functions that you can access:
Now, let’s assume I’m trying to find a formula to remove certain characters from a text string. I really need to search for “Text.”, but there isn’t a search option. No big deal, let’s convert this list into a table:
Once we’ve done that, we get a nice table of all of the functions, and we can filter them to our heart’s content. Here’s my table filtered down to just rows that begin with “Text”:
And a page or so down, I found something that looks like it might work: Text.Remove. So I clicked on the green Function beside it’s entry
It pops up an Invoke Function box to try it out, which I did. And behind that is the syntax for how it’s supposed to work. So that’s pretty cool.
I tried it out with some text, then reverted to the previous step, as I wanted to look at the syntax page that popped up behind the Invoke Function dialog:
My only complaint here is that once you land in this window, the only indicator of the actual function name is in the smallest font on the page, buried in the middle. You’d think that the name would should up a little more prominently.
At any rate, now that I’ve been able to explore the functions and found one I’d like to use, I can just knock off the extra steps shown below in yellow, returning me back to my original source query:
Learning more about Power Query functions
For reference, this is one of the many things that Miguel and I will be covering in our upcoming Power Query training workshops. Learn more about the workshop and register here: http://powerquery.training/course/
The post What Power Query Functions Exist? appeared first on The Ken Puls (Excelguru) Blog.