Referencing Individual Cell Values From Tables In Power Query

[This blog post is relevant to Power Query in Excel 2010/2013, the Get & Transform section on the Data tab in Excel 2016, and the Get Data screen in Power BI Desktop. I’m going to use the term ‘Power Query’ in this post to refer to all of the previously mentioned functionality]

Sometimes, when you’re working with a table of data in Power Query, you want to be able to get the value from just one cell in that table. In this blog post I’ll show you how you can do this both in the UI and in M code, and talk through all of the more advanced options available in M. Incidentally this is a topic I covered in some detail in the M chapter of my Power Query book, but since that book is now somewhat out-of-date I thought it was worth covering again in a blog post.

Referencing Cell Values In The UI

Imagine your data source is an Excel table that looks like this:

If you import it into Power Query, and you want to get the value in the cell on the second row in ColumnB, then in the Query Editor window you just need to right-click on that cell and select Drill Down:

…and bingo, you have the value 5 returned:

Note that this is the value 5, and not the value 5 in a cell in a table – a Power Query query can return a value of any data type, and in this case it’s going to return a single integer value rather than a value of type table. If you load the output of this query into Excel you’ll still see it formatted as a table, but if you’re using the output of this query as an input for another query (for example, you might want to read a value from Excel and use that value as a filter in a SQL query) it’s much more convenient to have an integer value than a table with one column and one row.

Referencing Cell Values in M

You can see in the screenshot above the M code generated for the Drill Down by the UI, and probably guess how it works. Here’s a cleaned-up version of the query from the previous section for reference:

let
Source = Excel.CurrentWorkbook(){[Name="SourceData"]}[Content],
ChangeDataTypes = Table.TransformColumnTypes(
Source,
{{"ColumnA", Int64.Type},
{"ColumnB", Int64.Type},
{"ColumnC", Int64.Type}}),
GetMiddleCell = ChangeDataTypes{1}[ColumnB]
in
GetMiddleCell

There are three steps here:

• Source reads the data from the Excel table
• ChangeDataTypes sets the data types for the three columns in the table to be Whole Number
• GetMiddleCell returns the value from the middle cell of the table returned by the ChangeDataTypes step

M allows you to refer to individual values in tables by a system of co-ordinates using the name of the column and the zero-based row number (tables in Power Query are always assumed to be sorted, therefore it making it possible to ask for a value from the nth row). So the expression
ChangeDataTypes{1}[ColumnB]

returns the value from the cell on the second row in the column called ColumnB of the table returned by ChangeDataTypes, which is 5. Similarly, the expression

ChangeDataTypes{0}[ColumnC]
returns the value 3, which is the value in the column ColumnC on the first row.

It’s also worth pointing out that the row and column reference can be in any order, so the expression

ChangeDataTypes{1}[ColumnB]

…returns the same value as

ChangeDataTypes[ColumnB]{1}

As you’ll see in a moment, the order that the row and column reference come in could be important.

Referring To Rows Or Columns That Don’t Exist

What happens if you write an expression that refers to a row and/or column that doesn’t exist? You get an error of course! So using our example query, the expressions

ChangeDataTypes{4}[ColumnB]

and

ChangeDataTypes{1}[ColumnD]

…will both return errors because there isn’t a fifth row in the table, and there isn’t a column called ColumnD.

However, instead of an error you can return a null value by using the ? operator after the reference. For example, the expression

ChangeDataTypes{1}[ColumnD]?

returns the value null instead of an error:

You have to be careful though! The expression

ChangeDataTypes{4}?[ColumnB]

still returns an error, not because there isn’t a fifth row but because the reference to the fifth row returns a null value and there is no column called ColumnB in this null value.

The solution here is to reverse the order of the references, like so:

ChangeDataTypes[ColumnB]{4}?

or even better use ? with both references:

ChangeDataTypes{4}?[ColumnB]?

Unfortunately using ? won’t stop you getting an error if you use a negative value in a row reference.

The Effect Of Primary Keys

Did you know that a table in Power Query can have a primary key (ie a column or columns whose values uniquely identify each row) defined on it? No? I’m not surprised: it’s not at all obvious from the UI. However there are several scenarios where Power Query will define a primary key on a table, including:

• When you import data from a table in a relational database like SQL Server, and that table has a primary key on it
• When you use the Remove Duplicates button to remove all duplicate values from a column or columns, which behind the scenes uses the Table.Distinct() M function
• When you use the Table.AddKey() M function on a table

The presence of a primary key affects how the Drill Down functionality works, and gives you another way of referencing individual cells.

Consider the following Excel table, basically the same as the table you’ve seen already but with a new column that uniquely identifies each row:

If you load the table into Power Query and then right-click on the column MyKeyColumn and select Remove Duplicates, you will have set this key as a primary key:

(By the way, you can use the Table.Keys() function to see what keys are defined on a table in Power Query, and there’s an example query showing how to use this in the sample workbook for this post).

Having done this, if you use the Drill Down functionality to get the value from the second row in ColumnB once again, this time you’ll get a query something like this:

let
Source = Excel.CurrentWorkbook(){[Name="SourceData3"]}[Content],
ChangedDataTypes = Table.TransformColumnTypes(
Source,
{{"MyKeyColumn", type text},
{"ColumnA", Int64.Type},
{"ColumnB", Int64.Type},
{"ColumnC", Int64.Type}}),
RemovedDuplicates = Table.Distinct(
ChangedDataTypes,
{"MyKeyColumn"}),
SecondRow = RemovedDuplicates{[MyKeyColumn="SecondRow"]}[ColumnB]
in
SecondRow

The last step is the important one to look at. The row in the reference is no longer by the row number but by the value from the primary key column instead:

RemovedDuplicates{[MyKeyColumn=”SecondRow”]}[ColumnB]

You can still use the previous row number-based notation, but when a table has a primary key column defined on it you can also use a value from the primary key column to identify a row.

A Last Warning About Performance

Being able to reference individual values like this is incredibly useful for certain types of query and calculation. However, bear in mind that there are often many different ways of solving the same problem and not all of them will perform as well as each other. One obvious use of the techniques I’ve shown in this post would be to write a previous period growth calculation, where you need to refer to a value in a previous row in a table – but my experience is that writing calculation using row and column references prevents query folding and leads to poor performance, and an alternative approach (maybe like the ones shown here and here involving joins) often performs much better. There aren’t any general rules I can give you though, you just need to make sure you test thoroughly.

You can download the sample workbook for this post here.