Can you manually insert row data in a custom column?

[Anonymous]

Hello there, 

I have several tables in my Power Bi Project, however, two of them don't have a relationship with one another when they should. This isn't Power Bi's fault, this is due to the CRM my Company uses. But anyway, as a temporary solution, I wanted to manually create columns and make a fake ID's between the two so I can link them together (I know which ones join which). 

But in Power Bi I can't find how to manually insert data into a table, and you can't create a blank custom column to do this. Now obviously I could do this in the CSV's files (the current data sources), but these CSV files are automatically downloaded and replaced from the CRM every day, so the fake column that I make will disappear the next day. 

So I was hoping if there is a solution in Power Bi, most likely Query Editor where I can apply these steps and do what I want to do? 

[v-jingzhang · Accepted solution]

Hi @Anonymous 

My idea is that we can create an additional table in Power Query Editor to work like a dictionary table. You can also use a CSV file or any other data source you like to store the dictionary data. It would be like below, defining pairs of fake IDs and actual values in other two tables that should be joined. 

Fake ID	Name
1	aa
2	bb
3	cc
4	dd
5	ee

Then we can add a custom column to each table to look up and fill in the corresponding Fake ID value from the dictionary table. This can be done automatically with Power Query. 

Another workaround is that with this dictionary table, you can create relationships between this dictionary table and each of two tables. Then these two tables actually have a relationship with one another because dictionary table works like a bridge table between them. 

Hope this helps.

Regards,
Community Support Team _ Jing
If this post helps, please Accept it as the solution to help other members find it.

[amitchandak]

@Anonymous , Using the Enter Data in power BI, in Home tab. Create a same table, with additional data you want to append.

if needed you can append this data with another table, make sure column names are the same

[Anonymous]

@amitchandak Thank you for the reply. 

Unfortunately when I try that method it says the clipboard contents are too large to be pasted into the table. Which surprises me because there are only 146 rows and 4 columns of the table I copied.