One of the more recent additions to Power Query is the ability to access data from named ranges in the Excel worksheet rather than an Excel table. I’ve got used to formatting data as tables in Excel because that’s what Power Pivot needs to import data directly from the worksheet, but if you are working with Power Query and a pre-existing workbook then trying to reformat data as tables can be a pain. Also, if you just want to import a single value, for example as a parameter to a query, a table seems like overkill.
(Incidentally, if you’re wondering what a named range is in Excel, there are tons of good introductions to the subject on the internet like this one. You can do loads of cool stuff with them.)
Consider the following Excel worksheet:
There are three named ranges here: FirstRange, SecondRange, ThirdRange, and the values in the cells show which range the cells are in. FirstRange consists of two cells in two columns; SecondRange consists of three cells in a single row; and ThirdRange is consists of three, non-contiguous cells. (You can also use this trick to display the names of all contiguous ranges in an Excel workbook, but alas it does seem to work for non-contiguous ranges).
At the moment, the Power Query ribbon doesn’t make it obvious that you can use named ranges as data sources. However you can see all the tables and cells in a worksheet, and even return that list from a query, by creating a blank query and using the expression
= Excel.CurrentWorkbook()
Once you’ve done this you can see all the ranges (and also any tables) in the workbook, and click on the table link next to the name to see the data. For example, clicking on FirstRange shows the following table in a new step in the query editor:
The expression to get at this table in a single step is:
= Excel.CurrentWorkbook(){[Name="FirstRange"]}[Content]
The range SecondRange in my example is equally straightforward to reference, and you can see its contents by using the expression
= Excel.CurrentWorkbook(){[Name="SecondRange"]}[Content]
Unfortunately ThirdRange, which is not contiguous, is a problem: I can only get the first cell in the range. So the expression
= Excel.CurrentWorkbook(){[Name="ThirdRange"]}[Content]
Returns just this table:
It would be nice if we could get a list containing the cell values, rather than a table, for ranges like this…
Last thing to mention is that if you do want the value in a cell, rather than a table, you just need to right-click inside the cell in the Query Editor and select Drill Down:
This returns the value (in this case the text “Third Range Cell 1”) in the cell you clicked on:
This is a much more useful value to return than a table containing a single row/column, if you intend to use a value from a single cell in a named range as a parameter to another query.
You can download the sample workbook for this post here.
