Conditional JOIN using Power Query | A different way of merging in Power BI

In this video I show you how to do a conditional join in Power Query. Instead of using the merge feature from the ribbon I use an alternative way of joining two tables and compare it to a normal merge.

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📊 TRAININGS 📊
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⏱️ TIMESTAMPS ⏱️
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0:00​ Intro
0:31 Example
1:22 Creating a list
03:07 Filtering a list using List.Select
5:36 Using a filtered list to perform a conditional join
7:00 Fuzzy Match instead of a conditional join
08:47 End

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😍 JOIN 😍
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👇 CHECK THIS OUT! 👇
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[paulj]

Looks like I may have to watch this a couple of times

[nathanielklein]

Bas, this is phenomenal! I've been wondering for quite some time if there was a way to do a conditional merge in PQ. I do most of my transformations before bringing my data into PQ, but I was still curious if it was even possible. Your videos are like gold! I love your work - I follow a lot of Power BI channels, and I think your approaches are some of the most creative of anyone that I've seen. I personally would prefer if you removed the music from your videos, as I find it to be distracting from your brilliant content, but you and Chandeep of Goodly fame are easily my first stops if I'm looking for an out-of-the-box approach to a problem.

[ozGold]

You're a genius! Love this List function. Much better than using the interface of multi-step merge.

[nboisen]

Brilliant! Your teaching style is excellent, clear and concise.

[alexrivera]

Thank you so much! Each video you make is so useful!!

[eFilet-O-Fish]

For a more precise result return, simply merge the two tables upon selecting the merge toggle and utilize, "Inner Join" instead of "Left Join" for an exact match. To me, it seems to be more intuitive, and fewer steps involved. Love to hear your thoughts. (:

[opod]

Impressive! I had no idea you could do such a thing!

[bryanabreo]

This is the coolest trick I've learnt this week!! Super amazing content...Thank you for sharing☺

[MarkDarbyshireyepitsme]

Very cool. I've always had a problem with the Power Query Merge for large datasets since PBI takes so long to evaluate the results. Does this offer any performance improvements?

[shamf]

how is the conditional join performance wise? when comparing with merge option? which one faster

[mayursharma]

Test to Columns option would be easy for getting the vendors I guess. However, I learned something today. Thanks man!

[fakename]

Thanks for this. This gets me a bit farther down my road. I am trying to generate a column that will refer to a second table that will evaluate a date range and return a value from that table.

[rerangelt]

Ey Buz. Great video. Love all of them.

[lexrobe_fly]

So great! Thanks a lot for showing this alternative!

[oddy]

Great content, but just a bit of feedback - maybe have the Power BI area large on the screen and less of you, atm its 60/40 to you, would be better 70/30 to Power BI
Still good to get the human touch - but want to focus more on what you're trying to do, and not just you.

[davidcarr]

Can you do the same thing with a table instead of a list if you have more than one column you need to reference

[ppmendonca]

What happens if more than 1 item on the list is present in the description?
Can we control that behavior?

[kishore_p]

Great content, as always! Thanks for sharing Bas! 🔥

[lazydrain]

Would you know how to do a merge only getting the data that has the highest value of date in a column?

[joenorbe]

Great technique. Watched it several times to understand. Thank you for creating this. I have a few questions? You said you don't want to load your list every time so you use List.Buffer. What does that do? Does it load one time, a few times, random times, not at all? Why did you add music to your videos? You're teaching complex content and the background music is distracting.