Renaming columns by another table and changing the naming without breaking existing reports

[Anonymous]

Hi,

I have a table (let's call it: rename_table), which is used to rename columns in other tables in a PowerBI report. The "rename_table" contains two columns: original_column_name and new_column_name. The renaming of columns in other tables is done in M-query with:

rename_column = Table.RenameColumns(source, Table.ToRows(rename_table), MissingField.Ignore)

I have the following problem. I want to change the new_column_names (i.e. overwrite the rename_table) without breaking graphs that use the current new_column_names. Is there any way to do it? From my tests I haven’t found a way to do it. Manually renaming the columns is not practical.

All the tables are SQL tables.

[parry2k · Accepted solution]

@Anonymous If you are changing the column names in PQ , your visuals are going to break, I guess you have to redo this or rename manually which you alredy know is painful. 

[Anonymous]

Thank you for a quick answer.

Do you know whether it is possible to build a solution in PowerBI which makes it possible to:

1. rename columns from some source

2. be able to change those rename column names, if needed, so that visuals won't break

Or is the only solution to do it manually?

[parry2k]

@Anonymous  unfortunatel afaik it is manual work. 

Would appreciate Kudos 🙂 if my solution helped.