- Understand the basics of data types in Power Query
- Data types in Power Query are used to classify values to have a more structured dataset. Data types are defined at the field level—values inside a field are set to conform to the data type of the field. The data type of a column is displayed on the left side of the column heading with an icon that symbolizes the data type.
- Learn how to convert data types
- Power Query has a number of built-in functions that allow you to convert data types. The most commonly used function is the “as” function, which allows you to convert a value to a specific data type. For example, if you have a column of text values that you want to convert to numbers, you can use the “as number” function.
- Use data profiling to identify data type issues
- Data profiling is a feature in Power Query that allows you to analyze your data and identify any issues with data types. To use data profiling, select your data and click on the “Data Profiling” button in the “View” tab of the ribbon. This will open a new window that displays information about your data, including data types.
- Use the “Change Type” button
- The “Change Type” button is another useful feature in Power Query that allows you to change the data type of a column. To use this feature, select the column you want to change and click on the “Change Type” button in the “Transform” tab of the ribbon. This will open a new window that allows you to select the new data type for your column.
- Use the “Detect Data Type” button
- The “Detect Data Type” button is another useful feature in Power Query that allows you to automatically detect the data type of a column. To use this feature, select the column you want to detect and click on the “Detect Data Type” button in the “Transform” tab of the ribbon. This will automatically detect the data type of your column based on its contents.
This entire article was generated using Bing‘s GPT, in somewhat of a weird experiment to see how it would respond to the prompt – “Can you provide me a blog post idea about teaching someone how to learn the data types in the Power Query formula language, using complete paragraphs to describe each suggestion” – it brings into question some very interesting choices like the example “as number” for data type casting, sure it’s great to define your data types but “as” definitely did not come to my mind when first thinking about how I would go about teaching people.
But, in the span of a few seconds you could almost call this the first page of a book – which itself is crazy to think about how quickly we could now generate full ideas from basic kernels and how it advances through the semantic kernel.
#IDK the future is weird and it’s here now. You should start learning more about prompt engineering would be my advice.