Forum Discussion
Merge not Finding Matches Against Custom Column
If you convert to real numbers you will lose the leading zeros. I would keep it as text. Use trim, then clean, then transform to lowercase (even for the numbers) then try it again. I actually just ran into this issue and by cleaning the column first, it worked.
Anonymous - the character strings I'm looking to match are all numerals, so unless I'm missing something, it doesn't seem likely that is the issue...
There might be spaces, blanks or unprintable characters in them. I'd recommend to convert them to "real" number formats and then you should be fine.
I'll give it a go using PwrBI to convert the columns to numbers. However the data in the Location table was manually entered by me fairly short number of rows and the other data, since its an extraction from a string, I don't see how it could have any misc. characters in it....
Maybe the data in your DB has. With field in "text"-format everything is possible.
Otherwise you can clean and trim both columns instead of converting them to numbers.
If you convert to real numbers you will lose the leading zeros. I would keep it as text. Use trim, then clean, then transform to lowercase (even for the numbers) then try it again. I actually just ran into this issue and by cleaning the column first, it worked.