In our excel paste tricks post, I have mentioned a paste special feature called “skip blanks” that can apparently be used to skip blank cells when pasting data. I am writing about this again because, I have received an email from Bruce saying,
This is erroneous. In actuality, the result that is pasted is the same size as what was copied, only in those cell references that were copied that happened to be blank, the destination cell references aren’t “written over”
and he is correct, I am wrong. I am sorry for this mistake. For some reason I didn’t test this tip while writing, I some how thought excel skips blank cells while pasting and shared the tip with you all. My mistake and thanks alot to Bruce for teaching me this tip in the correct way. I test all the tips posted here on at least one version of excel, this was an exception, I am hoping it will not be repeated.
Just in case you want to skip blank cells, here is a work around.
Apply data filters on the range from which you want to remove blanks, filter by non-blank cells and select it. Press ctrl+c and paste it wherever you want. Excel pastes only cells matching the filter criteria (thus skipping blanks)
PS: I have corrected the post too. The e-book will be corrected later on.
10 Responses to “Multiple Find Replace with Power Query List.Accumulate()”
Note: The text-formula above miss a -1. The video is correct.
😀 sorry, I made the exact same mistake as you did - initially - in the video. {0..3} is one thing, and Table.RowCount(replacements) -->3 items ={0,1,2} is another thing.
1st question : you've created a new column to put the replacements in. how ca we replace in the original column without creating a new one ?
2nd question : how can we replace the value in the entire cell and not only the text (Using ReplaceValue instead of text.Replace) ?
Thanks you in advance
Chandoo, I would be very interested to have your answers in both Yassine's questions!
Thank you for sharing,
Vassilis
Thank you for this! I was just doing an assignment where I was having to replace words with other words in my Excel sheet. We are starting with the basics in my class, so I know I don't have a huge list that I would need to find and replace, but this is something that could be useful down the road for me!
Hi
This is nearly perfect for my needs thank you, however I would like just the "replace" to be the result if possible please, I have tried in vain adjusting the formula without success.
Thank you in advance
Thank you! Awesome tip, and very flexible, too.
My find/replace values were in non-adjacent columns of a table containing a bunch of other data. Worked prefectly and I am now a tiny bit less clueless.
Hi!!!
I have the same question that Yassine did.
I need to replace the values in the same column. I don't want to create a new column e then have to remove the old column.
How could I could that?
That's a real fun article. It inspired me to delve deeper into the topic of List.Accumulate. I can see how the function works, but it takes an additional step to imagine how one can use it for more complex applications.
Your example also made it into my article, together with some other use-cases. Would be great to get your opinion on which other areas you would include in the article.
Let me drop the link to the page so others can too find it for further reading: https://gorilla.bi/power-query/list-accumulate/
Expression.Error: The name 'replacements' wasn't recognized. Make sure it's spelled correctly.