An interesting Power Query nugget for you: you can compare two tables using the Value.Equals() function. For example, take the following worksheet with five Excel tables on it:
The following Power Query query compares Table 1 with each of the other four tables and tells me whether they are identical or not:
let
Table1 = Excel.CurrentWorkbook(){[Name="Table1"]}[Content],
Table2 = Excel.CurrentWorkbook(){[Name="Table2"]}[Content],
Table3 = Excel.CurrentWorkbook(){[Name="Table3"]}[Content],
Table4 = Excel.CurrentWorkbook(){[Name="Table4"]}[Content],
Table5 = Excel.CurrentWorkbook(){[Name="Table5"]}[Content],
Output = Table.FromRows(
{
{"Table2", Value.Equals(Table1, Table2)},
{"Table3", Value.Equals(Table1, Table3)},
{"Table4", Value.Equals(Table1, Table4)},
{"Table5", Value.Equals(Table1, Table5)}
},
{"Compared Table", "Is Equal To Table 1"}
)
in
Output
All the code here is doing is loading the five Excel tables and then outputting a single table that shows the result of Value.Equals() when you compare the first table with the other four. Here’s the output:
I’ve tested this on tables sourced from SQL Server and quickly ran into a bug that crashed Power Query, but it seems as though Value.Equals() returns True when you pass it two identical tables and False when you pass it a table and a view which is just a SELECT * from that table. I wonder if there’s some extra metadata that allows Power Query to tell the difference between a table and a view? More research needed I think.
Overall this seems quite a handy trick to know about. This post has barely scratched the surface of what you can do with Value.Equals() though – you can compare any two values, not just tables, and you can specify your own function to do the comparison. As with so much of Power Query there’s a lot to learn… but that’s what makes it so fun!
You can download the sample workbook here.
