Skip to main content
cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Compete to become Power BI Data Viz World Champion! First round ends August 18th. Get started.

Reply
GabrielRP
New Member

Automatic format in column to remove all numbers and special characters

I'm a beginner in BI, currently I'm doing a BI for a company that I work. We have 9 sales channel, and when we receive data from our ERP Api, the data comes with order number.

GabrielRP_0-1663168201140.png

I needed to filter the sales channel to a standardized column to make some dashs with it, I've done some research and found a video teaching how to format a column to remove all numbers and special characters, doing that I created another column:

GabrielRP_1-1663168471326.png

That way I made this dash with all sales channel and the sales total:

GabrielRP_2-1663168555603.png

But now I'm having a problem, when we have a sale, the API gets the "observacaointerna" column with the sales channel and its order number and doesn't update the dash and I need to format and remove all numbers and special characters every day. So I'd like to know if there's a way to automatically format the data and remove all numbers and special characters.

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

If you used Power Query, each time Power BI refreshes data it will apply the transformation steps you defined automatically to the new data so I can't understand the problem. How are you refreshing the data?

View solution in original post

5 REPLIES 5
JorgePinho
Solution Sage
Solution Sage

Hey. Can you tell me how you removed all numbers and special characters? Was it in Power Query?

Jorge, I've removed in Power Query, I made another column and used the function: Text.Select([column],{"A".."z"}). The video that helped me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=II4wvIifIQg

If you used Power Query, each time Power BI refreshes data it will apply the transformation steps you defined automatically to the new data so I can't understand the problem. How are you refreshing the data?

Jorge, I didn't know this. I just see that our data didn't update, that's why the sales number from channels haven't increased. To know that Power BI refreshes data with transformation steps is awesome. Thank you so much.

You're welcome. Check this training to know more about this: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/training/modules/clean-data-power-bi/

Helpful resources

Announcements
August Power BI Update Carousel

Power BI Monthly Update - August 2025

Check out the August 2025 Power BI update to learn about new features.

August 2025 community update carousel

Fabric Community Update - August 2025

Find out what's new and trending in the Fabric community.

Top Solution Authors