Forum Discussion
Creating a new table in Power BI
Hello,
I'm new to the Power BI Desktop and I'm trying to create a new table that will have columns from the multiple tables I pulled in from my source. Could someone please help me with this?
Example:
I have a course table and Instructor table I need to bring certain columns from each table.
There are a couple of things you could do here.
You could use the Query Editor's "Merge Queries" function to join the two tables together as you pull it into Power BI. Details on that here: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Merge-queries-Power-Query-FD157620-5470-4C0F-B132-7CA2616D17F9. This is like a JOIN operation in SQL.
You could leave the two tables separate, and create a relationship between them in the Desktop's Data View. If there's a common column (InstructorID or CourseID perhaps?) between the tables this is probably simplest and the relationship might be detected and created automatically for you. More info on that here: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-desktop-create-and-manage-relationships
Which one you choose depends on the modelling and analytic questions you have, but as I said the second option is usually the simplest!
HTH Will
3 Replies
There are a couple of things you could do here.
You could use the Query Editor's "Merge Queries" function to join the two tables together as you pull it into Power BI. Details on that here: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Merge-queries-Power-Query-FD157620-5470-4C0F-B132-7CA2616D17F9. This is like a JOIN operation in SQL.
You could leave the two tables separate, and create a relationship between them in the Desktop's Data View. If there's a common column (InstructorID or CourseID perhaps?) between the tables this is probably simplest and the relationship might be detected and created automatically for you. More info on that here: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-desktop-create-and-manage-relationships
Which one you choose depends on the modelling and analytic questions you have, but as I said the second option is usually the simplest!
HTH Will
- I found a blog post about this subject here: http://sqljason.com/2013/02/union-operation-in-dax-queries.html
Hope this helps. HI
It really depends on what you want to do? It also depends on your model. A good model can answer a lot of your questions without doing a lot. If you can share the structure of your source tables and the questions you want to answer from the data I might be able to help you out.
Regards
Harris
