From the course: Power BI Data Methods

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Connecting to text files

Connecting to text files - Power BI Tutorial

From the course: Power BI Data Methods

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Connecting to text files

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- [Narrator] Flat files are two-dimensional structures storing data where each line represents a record. Within each line, it splits up values into separate fields. Examples of these types of files include .txt, .csv, .tsv, and others. While we would love to have our data already in a table structure when we read it into an application like Power Query, that's often not the case. Let's say we're reading a .txt file like this one. We first need to make sure our queries read each line within the file. Once we separate the lines, we then want to separate them into their fields. In this particular example, we're using fixed widths to delineate, meaning that after a certain number of each, it switches to the next field, but you can also separate by characters, which we'll talk about later. One of the data sets that we'll work with throughout this course is a daily summaries of weather measurements by Land-Based Station. The official name for this data set is the Global Historical…

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