COUNTA function is counting blank cells as well

[chandakaushik]

Did anyone notice that COUNTA DAX function is counting blank cells in the column as well? Microsoft's documentation says it counts the number of cells in a column that are not empty. Any idea what's happening? The column I am counting has text data type.

[parry2k]

@chandakaushik can you share sample dataset, what you are trying to do and what is not working? If it actually BLANK() or empty value in text field.

here is post on more detail on BLANK

[chandakaushik]

@parry2k I entered the data directly in PBI Desktop using "Enter Data" . Here is the sample dataset.

When using COUNTA on address column, it gives me a count of 10 while there are only 6 values in the column. I tried using ISBLANK function on address column, it gives me FALSE for each value. 

[Nathaniel_C]

@chandakaushik @parry2k ,

That is interesting. I am getting the same results, however if I load a table from Excel, the counta function works as expected, or rather Excel does not load anything into a blank cell.

Nathaniel

[chandakaushik]

 , @Nathaniel_C  - Yes, you're right Nathaniel. This is surprizing me as well. I don't understand how PBI is rendering blank cells in manually created tables.

@parry2k  - I entered the data manually and I'm sure there are no white spaces in the table. It's not showing null for blank cells in Power Query. When I use ISBLANK(TRIM([Address])), it still returns FALSE.

[parry2k]

Seems like when you are entereing data manually, it is not blank but white space. why not open you table in query editor and check if you see null or whitespace

[parry2k]

@chandakaushik based on your screen shot, it is not blank it has whitespace and that's why counta is not working

here I entered data manually, and how the table looks like and in 2nd image below, I used the replace command to replace whitespace with null and tha'ts when I see null and in this case it will work with BLANK() and 2nd case your COUNTA function will work

[chandakaushik]

Does that mean if I enter data manually in PBI Desktop, blank cells are rendered as white spaces, which I will have to replace to null?

[parry2k · Accepted solution]

that's what is looks like, and only reason you need to do that because you are using COUNTA or similar function which doesn't count BLANK otherwise you can always put condition in your measure to check for whitespace and blank() but replace can be more elegant solution.

[Nathaniel_C]

Hi @chandakaushik , 

You may want to ask @KenPuls . He wrote an amazing book about Power Query.  M Is for (Data) Monkey.

[KenPuls]

So... personally I usually pull data from external data sources.  This is one of those areas that is kind of frustrating, as PowerBI seems to read those empty cells and places blanks instead of null values.  The only way I know of to fix this is to replace <nothing> with null on the column to correct the default behaviour.