A newbie question about combining information from different columns

[Anonymous]

Hi! 

I have a data sheet that has three columns from which I want to combine data from. Here's an example. 

Column1        Column2       Column3

Topic 1           Topic 2          Topic 3

Loneliness      Depression   

Friendship      Abuse            Loneliness

Depression     Friendship

I would like to make a chart that shows in visual form how many times different answers appear in the data, like

Depression 2

Friendship 2

Loneliness 2

Abuse 1

I have done this in Excel with CountIfs function, but haven't been able to figure out how to most effectively do it in Power BI.  

Kind regards, 

Heidi 

[moumipanja · Accepted solution]

Hi @Anonymous

1. Go to Edit Queries -> Select all 3 columns and right click on it -> Unpivot columns -> Close & Apply

2. You have 2 columns in your table now, Attribute & Value. Create a Measure like below and you will get the result.

Measure = COUNTA(Table[Value])

If this answers to your query, please mark this as a solution.

[Anonymous]

Thank you so much for taking the time to help me out, works perfectly! 

Can I ask why is the measure needed? The solution seems to work even without it? 

With kind regards, 

Heidi 

[moumipanja]

There are several ways to get a particular answer and you are right, the above solution will work without a measure in this case. However. once your data grows and becomes complex in nature, Measures help you perform dynamic calculations in a much better way while interacting with your reports.

[Anonymous]

Thank you very much moumipanja for helpling me out, I really appreciate it. I will definately look into measures and try to get a hold of them. At the moment everything is still a bit overwhelming with so much to learn! 🙂