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olimilo's avatar
olimilo
Post Prodigy
5 years ago

How can I use a data source with variable column names and position?

Our organization would like to visualize the results of a survey questionnaire. This would be easy but the catch is the column names (well, more like question labels) and position may vary over time ...
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robinHH's avatar
robinHH
Frequent Visitor
5 years ago

Hi. 

a possible solution would to open both of the tables as data sources in the Power BI Query Editor. Then, you can choose the option "Append Queries as New". Now, you have several options to JOIN the data. You need to make sure upfront to use the same naming of headders in order to have a good matching.

Cheers
Rob

  • olimilo's avatar
    olimilo
    Post Prodigy
    5 years ago

    Hi Rob,

    If I'm understanding your suggestion correctly, this means that we should have a different query for each template used? That will only work if we only had 2 or just a couple of templates. However, this case would preferably want to be scalable as we could be working with different survey templates for specific clients, with versions for specific uses or revisions to existing templates.

     

    Also, the header names is unlikely to be the same with each template, again due to revisions/new template versions.

    • Anonymous's avatar
      Anonymous
      Not applicable
      5 years ago

      Hi olimilo ,

      You can put these data in one excel file and connect to that excel file with Power BI Desktop. When there is any change for original data, please update it in excel file. You can get the latest data after click "Refresh All" link in Power Query Editor.  You may get the error "The column xx of table wasn't found" when the column renamed or add new column in original data source. Please refer the content in the following links to resolve it.

      POWER BI AND LOCAL EXCEL DATA REFRESH

      10 Common Mistakes You Do In #PowerBI #PowerQuery – And How To Avoid Pitfalls

      Best Regards

      • olimilo's avatar
        olimilo
        Post Prodigy
        5 years ago

        Hi Rena,

        What we ended up doing was turning the data sheets into data tables in Excel and loading them as such in PBI. Afterwards, we unpivoted the data, merged it with a master question-ID-field name table to get merge the questions into common data points (where applicable) and finally pivoted it back.

         

        It's not the most graceful solution but if anyone has a better solution than this, we're all ears.