Forum Discussion
Expand excel table but limit columns
Hi,
Why is it fetching columns which are blanks into the Table? My guess is that there is formatting lying in the cells which look like blank cells to you.. Please open the source Excel file and delete the empty rows and columns. Save the file and close the file.
Ashish_Mathur thanks. i will try it again. that was one of the first things i did prior to putting the thread up
Super UserHi Anonymous
I can't really think of an easy way to do the column selection dynamically.
When you click on the double headed arrow to expand the table, Power Query is using the Table.ExpandTableColumn function and this requires that the columns be named.
So if you can get a list of the column names you want then you can feed these into the function, and avoid lots of clicking.
Alternatively, if you had some way to add some common prefix (for example) to the columns you wanted, you could use the Search ability in the Expand Columns dialog to select only these.
In this example I've renamed 2 of my columns to start with xxx_ and then searched for only these to expand them.
Not sure how practical this is for you, but these are ways to do it.
Regards
Phil
PhilipTreacy
thanks for reply
yeah doesnt look like that improves the performance of file as it still looks like it searches through
ill keep tweaking and see if there is something i am missing
thanks