Creating a new table in Power BI

[kwonder]

Hello,

I'm new to the Power BI Desktop and I'm trying to create a new table that will have columns from the multiple tables I pulled in from my source. Could someone please help me with this?

Example:

I have a course table and Instructor table I need to bring certain columns from each table.

[WillT · Accepted solution]

There are a couple of things you could do here.

You could use the Query Editor's "Merge Queries" function to join the two tables together as you pull it into Power BI. Details on that here: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Merge-queries-Power-Query-FD157620-5470-4C0F-B132-7CA2616D1... This is like a JOIN operation in SQL.

You could leave the two tables separate, and create a relationship between them in the Desktop's Data View. If there's a common column (InstructorID or CourseID perhaps?) between the tables this is probably simplest and the relationship might be detected and created automatically for you. More info on that here: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-desktop-create-and-manage-relationships

Which one you choose depends on the modelling and analytic questions you have, but as I said the second option is usually the simplest!

HTH Will

[HarrisMalik]

HI

It really depends on what you want to do? It also depends on your model. A good model can answer a lot of your questions without doing a lot. If you can share the structure of your source tables and the questions you want to answer from the data I might be able to help you out.

Regards

Harris

[bherring1979]

I found a blog post about this subject here: http://sqljason.com/2013/02/union-operation-in-dax-queries.html

Hope this helps.