Forum Discussion
Reducing data (columns) imported form Excel
Hi Anonymous ,
If the column name of the file does not change, the operation you thought before is right. What you do in the query editor is the first step in visualizing the data. When the data is refreshed in the future, as long as the column name does not change, the loaded data will not load the previously deleted columns.
Best Regards,
Liang
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Anonymous I don't think you can select columns prior to loading until there is a table in the Excel sheet with required columns if it was csv you could able to ignore columns but not sure if you can do it in excel.
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Thanks for replying so fast parry2k !
I wish I could go through my Excel sheet and actually delete the columns I don't want, right at the source, but since I'm downloading these reports repeatedly I'd rather just deal with Power BI being a little slow than having to delete multiple columns from multiple reports repeatedly.
I've included a screenshot of my first four query editor steps. The first three steps all deal with navigating to my file, and the four step is when my data finally appears in my query editor window. This is kinda just a rehash of my initial question, but is there a way to filter out some columns before I load my data? Or is my data actually loaded previous to the fourth step I'm mentioning? It would seem like the "Imported Excel" step would be where the data comes in, but I'm not familiar enough with the behind-the-scenes mechanisms to know.
The three steps prior to data loading; plus the data loading step
Anonymous depends how you are doing it, if you connect directly to excel sheet, navigation step will show the data and I guess you are combining multiple excel file, also I'm not sure if removing the columns in excel before loading will actually make a big difference, maybe you want to try to test it on sample files, remove columns and see if loads faster.