Forum Discussion
List and Table Extracting employee name using power query
- 1 year ago
Hi aqeel_shaikh,
Hello,
Thank you for reaching out to the Microsoft Fabric Community Forum.I have successfully reproduced your scenario where the Reportedby column contains a mixture of records, lists, and tables typically occurring when extracting Person/Group fields from a SharePoint list.
As you mentioned, expanding the column using the UI arrows doesn’t show any values this happens when Power Query detects inconsistent or complex structures. To address this, I used a custom column in Power Query that can intelligently detect and extract the employee names from each row, regardless of whether the value is a record, list, or table.
Output Achieved:
Here’s a summary of the final output based on your requirement:
- Single person: John Smith
- Multiple people: Jane Doe, Robert King
- From table: Alice Brown
- Nulls handled without error
- Displayed using Table, Matrix, and Card visuals
Here’s a preview of the result in visuals:
Hello,
Thank you for reaching out to the Microsoft Fabric Community Forum.I have successfully reproduced your scenario where the Reportedby column contains a mixture of records, lists, and tables typically occurring when extracting Person/Group fields from a SharePoint list.
As you mentioned, expanding the column using the UI arrows doesn’t show any values this happens when Power Query detects inconsistent or complex structures. To address this, I used a custom column in Power Query that can intelligently detect and extract the employee names from each row, regardless of whether the value is a record, list, or table.
Output Achieved:
Here’s a summary of the final output based on your requirement:
- Single person: John Smith
- Multiple people: Jane Doe, Robert King
- From table: Alice Brown
- Nulls handled without error
- Displayed using Table, Matrix, and Card visuals
Here’s a preview of the result in visuals:
What I Did:
In Power Query, I added a custom column with the following logic to extract Title from various formats:
if (Type.Is(Value.Type([Reportedby]), type record)) then
try [Reportedby][Title] otherwise null
else if (Type.Is(Value.Type([Reportedby]), type list)) then
Text.Combine(List.Transform([Reportedby], each try _[Title] otherwise null), ", ")
else if (Type.Is(Value.Type([Reportedby]), type table)) then
Text.Combine(List.Transform(Table.ToRecords([Reportedby]), each try _[Title] otherwise null), ", ")
else
null
For Your Reference, I’m attaching the .pbix file.
Thank you.
aqeel_shaikh Hi! can you paste your M code of the advanced editor of the power query?
BBF
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