Forum Discussion

Anonymous's avatar
Anonymous
Not applicable
3 years ago

Removing columns in Power BI source file

Lets say I have an excel table with 100 columns and I load this into Power BI, however I only want to use 30 columns.

As the 100 column file is how the data is downloaded from our system I do not want to delete any unwanted columns here, this I will do in Query as the future files will include these columns.

After the file is loaded into query, I transform the data and remove the unwanted columns.

Now I discover the future downloaded files (source data) exclude the unwanted columns however it clearly doesn't match what was originally loaded into Power BI. 100 vs 30 columns.

How can I change the way Power BI/Power Query views the file as I want to now upload the new file now containing only 30 columns, not 100.

I have looked in Advanced Editor and I didn't actually remove the umwanted columns I selected the required ones and used Remove Other Columns

Thanks

Paul

2 Replies

  • Greg_Deckler's avatar
    Greg_Deckler
    Icon for Community Champion rankCommunity Champion

    Anonymous I'm super confused. You say you removed the columns. And that sounds like a good thing. Beyond that, I'm lost.

  • Anonymous's avatar
    Anonymous
    Not applicable

    I would now like to upload a new source file which now excludes the columns I removed in Power Query, however I highlighted the columns I wanted to keep and then selected Remove Other Columns.  Therefore I cannot see the columns I removed in Advanced Editor