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dal211's avatar
dal211
New Member
5 years ago

Fixed Width Import Issue

Hi all,     I'm kind of a beginner in PowerBI, but I have a pretty large ASCII dataset that I'm trying to delimit into proper columns. For each variable, I have the text position mapping in order t...
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HotChilli's avatar
HotChilli
Community Champion
5 years ago

If I understand you correctly, from this-> "need to have 6,7,14,18,20,28,29" , it will combine 2 of your original columns into 1 when it imports to Power Query.

Hopefully, we can right-click on the column in the PQ editor and choose 'split column'.  There are a number of options from there to get the 2 columns required.

If you can't find one that works, post a sample of the combined columns and I can help.

  • dal211's avatar
    dal211
    New Member
    5 years ago

    Hi HotChilli,

     

     Very much appreciate your response. I apologize for not clarifying that well in my post, I've re-edited my post. 

     

    The real issue here is that I need to import the text positions in ascending order as required by PowerBI, I technically have as an example 

     

     

    6,7,14,18,20,21,28,28,29,31,36,39

     

     

    This causes an error within PowerBI as the numbers 28 are repeated twice (...28, 28....). But I still want to include the variables "Time of Birth" - positions 21-28 and "DOB WK" - 25-28 in the delimiting process. This duplication of numbers happens frequently throughout my dataset.

     

    If I want to make PowerBI accept my series of numbers, I have to choose between:

    One series that ONLY includes "Time of Birth" positions 21-28

     

    6,7,14,18,20,21,28,28,29,31,36,39

     

    OR

    One series that ONLY includes "DOB WK" positions 25-28

     

    6,7,14,18,20,25,28,28,29,31,36,39

     

    Thank you again for your help!