How to Create Running Totals & Rankings in Microsoft Excel Power Query

Let’s say Hi to Szilvia!

This week Szilvia shows us some awesome Power Query tips in the context of something many of us do – bar trivia!  Excel.TV’s own high priestess reports from sunny, southern California, where spreadsheets are the brightest you’ve ever seen. 

Excel Tips & My thoughts

As someone who is just really getting started with Power Query and Power BI, I was really looking forward to this video. One of the things Szilvia shows you how to do is to get data into Power Query with just a named range! – that’s right, you don’t need an Excel Table. I thought that was pretty cool. 

She also shows you how to make that top row into a header row, unpivot columns (one of my favorite features) and how to regroup everything into summarized results.

I love how she uses this in the context of pub trivia. But if you think about it, you can use this example on your own dashboards. It does require that you press an update button. Those who’ve read my books know my strong opinions about run/update buttons. But still, it’s a pretty cool trick! In fact, I kinda love it!

Free Webinar: Building an Awesome Data Model in 7 Easy Steps

We’re excited to let you know, we’ll be running Szilvia’s webinar again very soon, which deals with building data models from scratch. The name of her webinar is Building an Awesome Data Model in 7 Easy Steps. Her webinar is by far one of our most popular, but we haven’t run it in over a year! Last time we ran it, someone said it was the BEST webinar they’d ever been to (this is Jordan writing this, by the way, and they didn’t say that about mine!). 

In any case, we would live if you joined us for it. Click the link below. We’re still working like busy beavers behind the scenes to make sure everything is up and running. If we’re ready to go, the registration page will be up! 

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Leave us Your Comments!

What do you think about using Power Query for bar trivia? Let us know what you think in the comments!

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Jordan Goldmeier

Jordan Goldmeier is an accomplished data professional with a wealth of experience across various industries. He currently serves as a consultant at Anarchy Data, where he assists businesses in maximizing the capabilities of Excel for financial planning and analysis. Jordan is also an instructor at Full Stack Modeller and a former Adjunct Instructor in Analytics at Wake Forest University. His extensive career has seen him hold positions as the Chief Operations Officer at Excel.TV, Data Science Manager at DataKind, Data Scientist at Dealer Tire and EY, Analytics & Data Vis Developer at The Perduco Group, and Operations Research Analyst at Booz Allen Hamilton. Jordan's background in data analytics and his passion for Excel make him a valuable resource for businesses seeking to improve their data-driven decision-making processes.

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