what type of data is this?

[Anonymous]

this should be a name field in a table but when accessing all the data is a mixture of letters and numbers - is there a way to decode in power query?

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Those are GUID (Globally Unique Identifier) values. They can't be "decoded", but they can be used to lookup/join on whatever thing they identify. 

--Nate 

[Anonymous]

this is actually really helpful thanks.