Selecting Columns Based on Data Types in Power Query

Sandeep Pawar solves an interesting problem:

It’s not uncommon to have a table with hundreds of columns with different column types such as numerical, text, date, percentage etc. You can select columns by using the UI option “Choose Columns” and then selecting which columns to keep. But if you have have tens of columns of the same type, you will have to manually go through the list of columns and select the columns to keep. As far as I know, there is no direct way to only keep, for example, numerical columns. In Pandas, you can use select_dtypes method and pass which columns to choose based on the data types. No such option or function is available in Power Query.

In this example, I will show how I achieved it. You can customize it or turn it into a function based on your use case.

Read on for two classes of technique which do the trick.