Formatting multiple columns at the same time?

[Dimani]

Hello

In Power Query, is it possible to format multiple columns/fields at the same time.  We will be using the same format for all those interested columns/fields, and all of them are numeric fields.  We would like the negative number to be shown in () instead of the negative sign.  We want whole numbers.

So far I have found these two functions in Power BI, but not sure we can apply specific format masks to them.

Number.FromText

Text.Format

Thanks

D

[ronrsnfld]

I do not believe that is possible. In general, you cannot format a datatype in Power Query without changing the datatype to a text string. This is different from Power BI and/or Excel where you can format a number or date in a variety of ways, and it still remains a number or date. If just for display purposes, you can use Number.ToText for certain types of formatting, but you would have to construct a string if you wanted to display negative numbers with (). Again, these values will not be numeric and would need to be converted back to numbers if you were to use them in a subsequent calculation.

[Dimani]

Thanks for your information.  We were wishing there was an easier way.  I will discuss this with my colleague to see if we want to use this approach, knowing that when we need to perform calculation, we will need to convert the data back to numeric.

[ronrsnfld]

In general, I think of PQ as something used to shape your data, and Power BI to display formatted reports. Trying to do the formatting in PQ would be an inefficient use of the tool.