The most important changes made for the May 2017 Power BI Desktop update
Part seven of a seven-part series of blogs

The May 2017 Power BI Update brings in a couple of nice new query transforms and some new chart features, but the big changes are still in preview mode.

  1. Updates in the May 2017 Edition of Power BI Desktop
  2. Support for Different Types of URLs in Tables and Textboxes
  3. New Table and Matrix Visualisations in the Offing
  4. Extracting Text Between Delimiters
  5. New Binning Options
  6. Data labels in combination charts
  7. Combining Files - Option to Choose First File (this blog)

For a cumulative list of all of the updates to Power BI Desktop in the last few months, see this blog.

Posted by Andy Brown on 17 May 2017

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Combining Files - Option to Choose First File

Since November of last year, you've been able to combine files having the same format.  For example, suppose that you have three files containing people in different departments:

Production department

One of the three workbooks (Production.xlsx).

 

You want to combine these together to get a single list of all of the rows in the three workbooks:

Combined data

The final query should combine 3 workbooks into one.

As a refresher, you can do this by choosing the following menu option:

Importing from folder

Choose to get data from a file, and then choose the Folder option.

You can then choose two or more files, and combine them:

Combining 3 files

Here we're combining 3 Excel workbooks.

You can now choose to use the first file as a template:

First file option

This option is new!

What this means is that you can combine the files in a folder together, without having to worry about whether the one you chose as a template has been deleted.

  1. Updates in the May 2017 Edition of Power BI Desktop
  2. Support for Different Types of URLs in Tables and Textboxes
  3. New Table and Matrix Visualisations in the Offing
  4. Extracting Text Between Delimiters
  5. New Binning Options
  6. Data labels in combination charts
  7. Combining Files - Option to Choose First File (this blog)
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