Ed Hansberry solves a problem in a world without window functions:
When you group data in Power Query, you are able to do a number of aggregations, like count, sum, min, max, etc. The problem is each of those aggregations only operate on that column. Let me show you what I mean. Suppose you have this data:
You need to return a table to the DAX model (or an Excel table) that only has one record per product, and you want the latest date, and the sales person associated with that date. So for product A, it is June 18, 2020 and Suresh, for B it is June 14, 2020 and Ana, and so on.
In the SQL world, this is where a combination of common table expression and ROW_NUMBER() could get the top record partitioned by product ordered by date descending. Click through for Ed’s DAX-based solutions.