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Appending Data In Power BI

Ginger Grant shows that data sets don’t need to be exactly the same for Power BI to combine their contents:

Recently I worked on a Power BI project where I needed to merge data provided in spreadsheets. The spreadsheets came from different vendors and while they contained mostly the same data, the columns were not in the same order. I wanted all of the data to reside in one table. In Query, that means that I wanted to Append the data. The files which I were merging were very wide, and I missed the fact until after I was done that some of the columns were in different order. Power BI is smart enough to figure out the order on its own. I didn’t need to change the order of the columns at all, as long as they have the same column names. Here’s an example using three different files.

That’s a sign of a smart tool.