Category Archives: Data

Turning multiple values into one string in Power BI

Or concatenating if you will, but I don’t always remember that word which is probably why the solution didn’t come to me at once when I ran into the problem.

Concatenation is taking two or more values and chaining them, often with a delimiter. Like the first and last name of a person, or a zip code and the name of the area.

This demo data set is made up by looking at a persons grades in different classes they have taken. So if we want to show that information for all persons we would typically show it in a table like this.

Now what if we didn’t care to much about the grades for now, and wanted to show which classes a person had taken. We could of course just remove the Grade column and keep the table, but what if we only want to have one row per person? My gut feeling was playing with the matrix in Power BI, but that only shows the first value since this is a text column so it’s not what I am after at all.

The answer? Concatenation in a measure. Very often concatenation is done between two columns, but here I need it done on rows so the CONCATENATEX function is what we want. First I made this measure

Classes non distinct = CONCATENATEX(Example,Example[Class],”, “)

which gave this result

Looks ok, but the total row has duplicates in it and if we had grades for several years we would have it on each person as well if they had taken the same class several times and I only want the distinct values. Luckily we can then use the VALUES function to only get distinct values in a column so the measure now looks like this.

Classes = CONCATENATEX(VALUES(Example[Class]),Example[Class],”, “)

Which gives this result

Perfect! This can now be filtered and used like any other measure.

Smart data? Or Smart People?

A while  back Stephen Few argued that data can not be described as being beautiful. At that point in time I did not agree to this statement. I do think data can be beautiful, but as the term “smart data” is popping up more and more I find myself unable to use this term to describe data. Am I being a hypocrite? Can data be beautiful, but not smart?

To me data is one of the dumbest things out there, it just exists. Data on it’s own creates absolutely nothing, it wouldn’t even have existed if someone didn’t create it. So even though I find myself saying that data can be beautiful I don’t like the term smart data. Data can be structured, organized and formatted beautifully, but being smart? No!

By stating that data is smart we take away the credit from many people who works with data each day. Smart people, really smart people! They are the ones that deserves the credit for all the amazing things data can be used for, not the data itself. Do we call trees smart just because we can do amazing things with them? No, but the inventors of paper, housing and so on they were geniuses!

Give credit where credit is due. Data is lazy, it would lie on the couch all day if it could. The people that works with data on the other hand and gets the data up from the couch and creates amazing products and services with it, they do all the dirty work and should also get all the glory!