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captainlaw's avatar
captainlaw
Icon for Microsoft Employee rankMicrosoft Employee
10 years ago

Edit Data within PBI Desktop?

Hello PBI Folks, I'm wondering if desktop allows me to edit individual cells of a dataset that was loaded from Excel?  If desktop does not support editing of one cell, I'll simply edit from the sour...
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Anonymous's avatar
Anonymous
Not applicable
10 years ago

I think you need to edit your source data and refresh.  

 

Editing the data in PBI would open up a minefield of data integrity and security issues.  That being said, you can of course transform the data when you get, ReplaceValues etc. with the Power Query scripts, or enter data manually or via script (e.g. Chris Webb's post on Creating Tables In Power BI/Power Query M Code Using #table())

  • captainlaw's avatar
    captainlaw
    Icon for Microsoft Employee rankMicrosoft Employee
    10 years ago

    I don't think security would be an issue to edit data cause it's like you said transforming data.  Yes, I'm able to write M language to modify entire column of data, just wasn't sure if there's script to edit individual cell, so I assume not.  I'll go the route of modify excel and refresh.

     

    Thanks.

    • v-sihou-msft's avatar
      v-sihou-msft
      Icon for Microsoft Employee rankMicrosoft Employee
      10 years ago

      captainlaw

       

      To edit cell data in your dataset, the best practice is editing your source data and refresh data source. But you can also achieve it with Power Query or DAX formula. You need to select that specify column, then apply filter to find the row and replace the value in that cell. Please refer to a slimilar thread: Replacing just 1 value in a table.

       

      Regards,

      • captainlaw's avatar
        captainlaw
        Icon for Microsoft Employee rankMicrosoft Employee
        10 years ago

        Thanks Simon.  Having bunch of IF clause or using selectcolumns function will be too clunky to maintenance over time.  Maybe in the future, PBI will allow cell data modification right within the UI, like Excel.  Just a thought.  Thanks.