How to anonymize/mask part of Data

[Anonymous]

Hi every body,

I have a dat and I work with Power BI Desktop, and I want befor to start my analysis to anonymize(mask) the first name column and the last name column(and replace by a ID code).

Any ideas how to create unique masked customer names with Power BI?

Thank you.

Best regards,

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

One way of preventing anonymised names from being merged in visualisations is to make sure they are not the same.

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Add a calculated column:

Anonymised = "Airline " & RANKX('MyTable','MyTable'[CustomerName],,ASC,Dense)

Result:

Airline 1
Airline 2
Airline 3
...

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If you prefer x's:

Add a Anonymised_Name table,

Name             Anonymised Name
"Air Holland"    "Air xxxxxxx"
"Air Hungary"    "Air xxxxxxx "
"Air Iceland"    "Air xxxxxxx  "

Use "fake space" (alt+0160 on the numpad) to prevent PowerBI from swallowing it up. Add a relationship and use this column in visualisations.

I prefer previous option as it makes it easier to distinguish and keep track of individual customers.

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If you don't care whether number of "x"s matches real name:

Anonymised_Name_2 = "Air XXXXXXX" & REPT(" ", 
  RANKX('MyTable','MyTable'[CustomerName],,ASC,Dense))

(again fake space alt+0160)

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Depending on what you do with your report, there is a significant risk of real customer names "leaking", so ideally you would want to anonymize your data before importing it.

[Anonymous]

Thank you Lewis.