Posted inData & Analysis

Character Escape Sequences In M

When you’re working with M code in Power BI or Power Query/Get&Transform you may want to include special characters such as carriage returns, line feeds or tabs inside a text value. To do this you’ll need to use character escape sequences inside your text. Information on…
Posted inData & Analysis

The Extension.Contents() M Function

Following on from my post last week about M functions that are only available in custom data extensions, here’s a quick explanation of one of those functions: Extension.Contents(). Basically, it allows you to access the contents of any file you include in the .mez file of…
Posted inData & Analysis

The Diagnostics.ActivityId() M Function

I’ve blogged a few times about the tracing functionality that is built into Power Query/Get&Transform and Power BI (see here and here). The trace files themselves clearly contain a lot of interesting information, but there’s no official documentation about what they contain and the format seems…
Posted inData & Analysis

Daylight Saving Time And Time Zones In M

Quite a few people (Ken Puls, Reza Rad and today Chris Koester) have blogged about how the M date/time zone functions work in Power Query/Power BI, and the related problem of turning a UTC time into the actual time in any given location taking Daylight Saving…