Retreiving data from pictures

Power Query (which has been the go-to tool for importing data into Excel for some time now) has a new option! Rereiving data from PDF documents has been around for a long time, and now you can also pick up tables from an image or image on the clipboard. So, if someone sends you an invoice that they took a photo of via Viber or WhatsApp, you don’t have to enter the data manually.

Hierarchy of employees

Whether we use Excel BI or Power BI data model, we can create a hierarchy of employees manually or with the help of some DAX functions. In this text you will learn how to use two such functions: PATH and PATHITEM. With their help, it is possible to create calculated columns that show the hierarchical level of each of the employees within the company.

Custom data types

Traditional Excel has only two data types: text and numbers. All others (date, time, percentage, etc.) are specially formatted numbers. In the second half of 2019, Microsoft added new data types to Excel: Geography and Stocks. First, for a given term, offers an abundance of geographical determinants while the second provides data on stock market. A lot of new types have been announced, and since recently users of Microsoft 365 subscriptions can create custom data types.

Ranking

In one of the previous “recipes” you could get acquainted with the EARLIER function. Here you could learn how to use this function to calculate the rank based on highest price of the product within a table. This can be done much more easily, by applying the RANKX function. Let’s see how it is used and what other options are also available when ranking data through DAX.

Belonging to a set

If we want to check, within the DAX statement, whether the element belongs to the given set we will use the operator IN and then, in the extension, in curly brackets, list the elements that belong to the set. In this way we can associate a filter within the CALCULATE function that specifies more than one value. A similar effect is achieved with the CONTAINSROW function.