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Anonymous's avatar
Anonymous
Not applicable
3 years ago

Extract PDF tables and append them but the column name & Structure is inconsistent

Hi,

I am trying to extract the tables from more than 100 pdf files and wish to append the tables but facing few challenges i.e.

1. One pdf files have multiple tables

2. Column names are inconsistent  for example -  Table1 (Column - Age)   Table2 (Column - Owner Age)

3. Table structure is also inconsistent i.e. some tables have 5 columns while few have 6 columns. So while extracting the data, miss the information of extra column.

 

Please share if we can resolve this via power bi.

Thanks

Need Help

1 Reply

  • Ehren's avatar
    Ehren
    Icon for Microsoft Employee rankMicrosoft Employee
    3 years ago

    Is the data inconsistently structured in the source files? Or is Power BI extracting the data inconsistently?

     

    If the source files themselves are inconsistent, you can write some conditional cleanup logic in M to make them consistent. For example, the following logic renames the "Owner Age" column to "Age", but only if such a column exists:

     

    if Table.HasColumns(myTable, {"Owner Age"}) then Table.RenameColumns(myTable, {{"Owner Age", "Age"}}) else myTable