Forum Discussion
Does data cleaning automatically happen monthly?
Hi! I'm doing up a report on employee termination. Every month we get a new updated excel file of terminated employees, but this file is just the previous month's list with new names appended
E.g.
JANUARY
Winnie
Robin
Bruce
FEBRUARY
Winnie
Robin
Bruce
Kathryn
So what I did was upload all existing files into a folder (which i set as the source for PBI)
And i used the editor (query?) to combine them all and then remove duplicate rows.
My question is: when i drop fresh files into the source folder, will the duplicate rows be automatically removed? Or do i have to remove duplicate rows manually again. Do i have to press something?
The column names will be exactly the same.
I'm sorry for the stupid question! I'm a complete beginner to pbi and wasn't sure what keywords to google. thanks for any help!!
hi kowas2
Since you steps involve combining worksheets then removing the duplicates, Power BI will remove the duplicates when you refresh the semantic model. Just be aware though that that Power BI will keep the first row it sees for each distinct value which may not be necessarily ordered by month.
Hello kowas2,
In Microsoft Power BI, your data cleaning steps (like Remove Duplicates) are saved in Power Query and only run when you refresh.
- Add new file → nothing happens yet
- Click Refresh (or use scheduled refresh)
- Power BI recombines files and removes duplicates again
You don’t need to remove duplicates manually each time.
If you want it monthly without action:
- Set up Scheduled Refresh in the Service
5 Replies
You need to set up a scheduled refresh for your dataset. That will then look for all the files in the folder and remove the duplicate rows.
Hi kowas2,
Yes, Duplicate rows will get deleted automatically, in transfrom whatever stepe you perform are saved as applied steps which you can check on right side in Trasform data window.
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Let’s keep building smarter solutions together!hi kowas2
Since you steps involve combining worksheets then removing the duplicates, Power BI will remove the duplicates when you refresh the semantic model. Just be aware though that that Power BI will keep the first row it sees for each distinct value which may not be necessarily ordered by month.
Yes, the duplicate removal happens automatically on every refresh. The steps you built in Power Query — combining the folder files and removing duplicates — are saved as a reusable recipe that runs every time the data refreshes. You never have to redo them manually.
Hello kowas2,
In Microsoft Power BI, your data cleaning steps (like Remove Duplicates) are saved in Power Query and only run when you refresh.
- Add new file → nothing happens yet
- Click Refresh (or use scheduled refresh)
- Power BI recombines files and removes duplicates again
You don’t need to remove duplicates manually each time.
If you want it monthly without action:
- Set up Scheduled Refresh in the Service
