Prevent Power BI Automatically Renaming Columns to Include Spaces

[BeardyGeorge]

Hi All,

I'm trying to make use of the R scripting option to make some visualisations, but it's presenting some fairly serious issues.

For starters, the fact Power BI replaces underscores in field names with spaces means that R has a very hard time actually doing any of the things it's been included for (ggplot2, for example, really doesn't like spaces, so "just use the full name" as suggested here won't cut it).

Is there any way of forcing Power BI to take field names exactly as they're written in source rather than trying to be "helpful" and add spaces?

Failing that, have people had much success with renaming columns (either using the plyr package or more manually) in Power BI?

Alternatively, is there a way of editing the "#create dataframe" section of an R script in Power BI? (so that I can manually define my column names).

Semi-relatedly, is there any plan to include the make.names function in the R dataset definition going forward?

Thanks,

George

[Greg_Deckler]

I am not seeing the underscores replaced by spaces. I imported from a CSV file and the columns came in with the underscores. Can you provide more details around source or exactly when/where you are seeing the underscores replaced?

[BeardyGeorge · Accepted solution]

On closer inspection it appears the spaces are automatically inserted at some point during the OLAP/MDX level rather than by PowerBI itself, however that doesn't really help resolve the problem.

Regardless of how the spaces are being inserted, I still need to get rid of them in R.

EDIT:

on testing it appears that the following solves the problem:

names(dataset) <- gsub(" ","_",names(dataset))