what does ellipsis mean in table preview?

[Ceciliam]

Hi,

I'm not sure if you have seen ellipsis sign in your table preview before. What does it mean? They seem to go away after I adjust the field width to super wide. I am 100% sure I only have maximun of 6 digits here, so what is causing these ellipses to show still? Does anyone know? Thank you!

[Ceciliam]

Hi Pete, thank you! I added a trim step and the elipses are gone! 

[BA_Pete · Accepted solution]

Hi @Ceciliam ,

It means there's more data in the cell that isn't visible due to the column not being wide enough.

In Power Query, select this column then go to Transform tab > Format > Trim and see if this helps. If it does, it means your source data has 'padded' values (lots of spaces on the end) - fairly common in many application databases.

If this doesn't work, then try Transform tab > Format > Clean. This will remove any special characters (tabs, linefeeds etc.) that may be causing this issue.

*NB* If you trim/clean a primary key field in, for example, a dimension table, but do not trim/clean the corresponding foreign key in each fact table, you may find that merges between these fields no longer work in Power Query as PQ is very precise on value matching. It should not, however, affect relationships in your data model, nor DAX calculations (measures/columns etc.), as DAX tends to ignore leading/trailing spaces in values.

Pete