Join us at FabCon Atlanta from March 16 - 20, 2026, for the ultimate Fabric, Power BI, AI and SQL community-led event. Save $200 with code FABCOMM.
Register now!View all the Fabric Data Days sessions on demand. View schedule
I am trying to create a conditional column in a report that takes a value from another column and identifies it by the number of text characters in the string.
Example -
AB1234 = 2 text characters
Once this has been done I need to allocate a job type based on that number
Example -
2 = Job 1
I know I can use text.select to extract the text and text.length to count but don't want to create lots of extra column on a already big table.
Can anyone help me?
Hi SamanthaBowdell
This will count the number of alpha characters in a string that also contains numbers. Create a custom column and paste in the below:
=Text.Length(Text.Select([Column1], {"a".."z"}))
Column1 is the name of the column you want to obtain the count from. Does this help?
Neil
You could then have a separate table with the job numbers and descriptions, and then merge the tables on the job number to get the job description.
Check out the November 2025 Power BI update to learn about new features.
Advance your Data & AI career with 50 days of live learning, contests, hands-on challenges, study groups & certifications and more!
| User | Count |
|---|---|
| 11 | |
| 8 | |
| 6 | |
| 5 | |
| 3 |