Our training courses

Book any course as classroom, onsite or online training, or as one-to-one consultancy
Excel Training Basic Excel Advanced Excel VBA Macros Office Scripts Excel Introduction Excel Intermediate Excel Advanced Excel Business Modelling Power Pivot for Excel Excel VBA macros Advanced VBA Fast track Excel VBA Basic Office Scripts Advanced Office Scripts Power Platform Training Pure Power BI DAX and fast-track Power Automate Power Apps Introduction to Power BI Adv. Power BI Reports Adv. Power BI Data DAX for Power BI Fast track Power BI Fast track Power BI/DAX Power Automate Desktop Basic Power Automate Advanced Power Automate Fast track Power Automate Power Apps Programming and AI SQL training Visual C# training Python training AI training Introduction to SQL Advanced SQL Fast track SQL Introduction to MySQL Introduction to Visual C# Intermediate C# Fast track C# Introduction to Python Advanced Python Fast track Python Prompt engineering Using AI tools Using the OpenAI API SQL Server training Reporting Services Report Builder Integration Services Azure / SSAS Reporting Services Advanced SSRS Fast track SSRS Report Builder Introduction to SSIS Advanced SSIS Fast track SSIS SQL in Azure Data Studio SSAS - Tabular Model
You can see a calendar showing our current course schedule here.
Other training resources

Free resources

Read our blogs, tips and tutorials

Try our exercises or test your skills

Watch our tutorial videos or shorts

Take a self-paced course

Read our recent newsletters

Paid services

License our courseware

Book expert consultancy

Buy our publications

Getting help

Get help in using our site
Our training venues

Where we are

London

Manchester

Where you are

Across the UK

At your site

Online

At your computer
Why we are different

Transparent reviews

473 attributed reviews in the last 3 years

Delivery of courses

Refreshingly small course sizes

Outstandingly good courseware

Whizzy online classrooms

Wise Owl trainers only (no freelancers)

Nicer to work with

Almost no cancellations

We have genuine integrity

We invoice after training

Reliable and established

Review 30+ years of Wise Owl

View our top 100 clients

Search our website

GO
+44 (161) 883 3606 sales@wiseowl.co.uk Web enquiry form
We also send out useful tips in a monthly email newsletter ...

Sign up to newsletter

Our training courses

AI - Articial Intelligence

Power BI and DAX

Other training resources

Tips and tricks

Guides and tutorials

YouTube tutorials

Test your skills

Self-paced courses

Our training venues

Why we are different

Hundreds of published reviews

Small class sizes

Outstanding courseware

Online classroom

(Almost) no cancellations

Wise Owl trainers only

Genuine integrity

Invoices after training

30+ years of Wise Owl

Our top 100 clients

This page has 0 threads | Add post

Picture depicting blogs

Blogs

Finding our blogs useful? Please consider helping us to share more!

How to use an unpivot transform in Power BI Desktop Query Editor

Part two of a three-part series of blogs

If you get data in pivot (two-dimensional) form, you can unpivot it to get the underlying rows, and hence produce charts and visuals. This blog shows how!

Unpivoting data in Query Editor: a case study
Transforming data using UNPIVOT (this blog)
Creating a chart based upon the transformed data

Posted by Andy Brown on 04 January 2018

In this blog

Loading the initial data
Unpivoting the data

Transforming data using UNPIVOT

This part of the blog shows how to bring your Excel data into Power BI Desktop (or PowerPivot, if you're using that).

Loading the initial data

The first thing to do to massage the data into the right format is to load it:

Editing Excel data

Choose to load the Excel workbook, tick Sheet1 and then choose to go into Query Editor to edit the data.

Start by omitting the top row (it was a blank row in Excel):

Blank row at top

Choose to omit the top row (you'll need to enter 1 in the dialog box which appears).

Now choose to use the top row as column headers:

Column headings

The years are not data, but column headings.

Rename the left-hand column to get this:

The imported data

!

The tidied-up data.

Unpivoting the data

Time now to choose the columns you want to unpivot:

Unpivot selected columns

Select the columns which run horizontally, but which you want to show as separate horizontal rows, then choose the option shown.

Power BI Desktop creates one row for each cell in your table:

Results of UNPIVOT

Forecast sales for 2018 for the North region, for example, are 28.

It's usually a good idea to rename the Attribute column to something more meaningful:

Attribute column renamed

Here I've called this column Year.

Optionally, you could now rename the query steps;


Before renaming	After renaming

Finally, load your data into Power BI Desktoip:

Choose to save your changes, and show the transformed data in Power BI Desktop.

A confession - I've also renamed the table from Sheet1 to Forecast:

Renaming table

You can right-click on a table to rename it in the field list window.

The next (and final) part of this blog summarises how to show this data in a stacked column chart.

Parts of this blog
Unpivoting data in Query Editor: a case study Transforming data using UNPIVOT (this blog) Creating a chart based upon the transformed data

Some other pages relevant to the above blogs include:

This blog has 0 threads

Head office

Kingsmoor House

Railway Street

GLOSSOP

SK13 2AA

London

Landmark Offices

99 Bishopsgate

LONDON

EC2M 3XD

Manchester

Holiday Inn

25 Aytoun Street

MANCHESTER

M1 3AE

Visual C# training

Excel training courses

Power Automate training

Power BI / DAX training

Python training courses

SQL training courses

VBA (macros) training

© Wise Owl Business Solutions Ltd 2025. All Rights Reserved.

Terms & Conditions

End of small page here

Please be aware that our website uses cookies!

I'm OK with this Tell me more ...