Power Query: How to iterate over a list

By Satalyst Brilliance on 30 Apr 2015

If you’ve been using Power BI or you’ve seen the demos, then like me, you’re probably excited about Power Query. As a data nerd, I’ve been having a lot of fun pulling data sets off the web and mashing them up. Getting web data used to be quite a manual task for me, since I wasn’t about to write a custom screen-scraper. I really love the “From Web” functionality that mines web pages for HTML tables. But I’m a developer, so of course, I wanted to load a list of files, or a list of websites, and I had some trouble figuring out how to do it. Hopefully, my experiences will help someone else. One of the tricks that I found was that the list that you want to iterate over has to be pulled into Power Query designer. So let’s start with looping over a list of files – this is something that EVERYONE will want to do at some point. So first, launch the Power Query designer from the Power Query ribbon, and use the folder that you want as your data source: As you can see, you get a lot of meta data about your folder contents. The most important…

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