Daily Archives: 30-December-2018

I have been working through the book Collect, Combine and Transform Data Using Power Query in Excel and Power BI by Gil Raviv – it is an excellent Power Query (PQ) resource. I particularly like the methods discussed in Chapter 10, which focused on how to make your queries robust, that is, insensitive to minor deviations in the input data. Chapter 10 spoke to me, and I immediately began looking for some practice data that suffered from common inconsistencies: headings in different cases, minor spelling errors in the data body, and inconsistent wording (example, "Co." instead of "Company"). I found that data in the Wikipedia's information on US WW2 cruisers. In this post, I will look at the production of cruisers by the US during WW2. See Figure 1 for a typical example of a WW2 US light cruiser. Continue reading →