Best way to combine 400 small tables in Excel?

Copper Contributor

I have about 27 worksheets with 15 smaller tables on each worksheet that I need to connect into one major table to eventually create a dashboard. I used Power Query to do this. So far I've reached 170 queries and it takes a very long time to refresh. I cannot change the main tables as it is easier for everyone else to view and they update the data in these tables throughout the month. I'm looking for an alternative, would it really be faster if I simply tried to make a master table individually referencing the value in each table. I thought power query method would be more efficient. Please let me know if there is an alternative I haven't thought of yet?

7 Replies

@Jigyasa Are you using the From Folder connector? If you have the 27 sheets in one Folder, and the 15 tables have the same names in each of them, then you would need 1 query for each group of tables. That is 15! 

So, for example each query will connect to all tables called "Table1" in all 27 workbooks, creating one large Table1. Do that for all 15 tables. And then you can append the 15 large tables into one.

 

 

I have 27 sheets in the same workbook and I'm not quite sure what you mean by the same name as Excel doesn't allow me to have two tables with the same name. As for columns, they are mostly similar but have one difference of each client's names which I need to extract.

@JigyasaI thought you had 27 workbooks, each with 15 tables in it. So, you have one workbook, with 27 sheets in it, each having 15 tables on it?

And my I presume that the tables are structured Excel tables.

 

If so, then connect to the workbook. Select the workbook name in the Navigator and press transform.

Riny_van_Eekelen_0-1671618135363.png

In the next screen you can, for example, filter all rows where the Kind is Table and then expand the Data column.

Riny_van_Eekelen_1-1671618259687.png

If all of this does not make sense, explain how you are currently connecting to all the tables. Include screenshots like the ones above, showing the steps you take.

 

 

 

 

Hi,
The only issue with this is, my tables look like this
https://ibb.co/MBB7NBX
and each worksheet is monthly data. So when I upload them individually to a query, I'm extracting the first column name to create a client column and adding a new field to include which month the table is from. The month information is in the table name, example: clientABC_july22, but I have not been able to import.

So essentially the reason I'm uploading each table individually is so I can include the client name and month of the table into the data so that I can differentiate this data when I eventually append it all into one big table.
This is essentially what I've done just that I've gone the long route and added it table by table but I'm not sure if it can refresh any faster