Most of you know that during day time I work as a business analyst. Today while preparing some test scenarios for our latest insurance application, I came across a weird problem.
There are some steps in testing. For each test scenario, a combination of these steps is required. It is my responsibility to identify the steps as well as their combinations for each of the scenarios. So I quickly prepared a table with all the steps in left most column and one scenario each in one column. I put “X” in a cell if the step needs to appear in that scenario. But when I gave it to our testing team, they asked me if the scenarios can be explained a little better. See this picture to understand what they want and what I made.
So I immediately converted the “X”s to actual step names using a simple IF formula. (Copied the table, and wrote ‘if there is an X in the previous table, get the actual step from left most column otherwise empty‘).
Then the problem of actually removing various blank cells. First I tried to select all the blank cells and remove them using our technique from last week. But it failed as the blank cells are actually formulas with empty values. So I copy pasted the entire table as values (CTRL+C, ALT+ESV). But even then excel wont recognize blanks as true blanks (because the value is actually “” instead of being plain empty.)
Now I didnt want to manually select all the blank cells as the real testing scenario table had 50 scenarios with 68 possible steps.
Then it stuck me, why not use FIND (CTRL+F) to find all the cells containing nothing? So I selected the scenario table, opened the find and looked up all the cells that contain empty values. Now I clicked on “Find all” and selected the entire list of values from that. Finally I removed all these cells and bingo!
PS: Our testers was more than happy as it took very little time and they had all the scripts ready.
PPS: Thanks to Rick, who taught me FIND ALL approach to select blank cells (here).
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.