PowerQuery - Turning My Frown Upside Down

Microsoft has started to include this very handy button in all of their new Excel add-ins.

It is for people to send feedback to the Microsoft developers about problems they are having, problems they are solving or if they are generally happy with the product.

This week I was using PowerQuery to see if I could use it to query Active Directory (AD) and list all the members of a specific AD Group (more on this in a future post). However, whilst I was able to get PowerQuery to list the members of some AD groups it wouldn’t list them for the groups I was actually interested in.

I reached out to a friend of mine Niko Neugebauer (twitter | web), he took a look at what I had done and couldn’t see anything obviously wrong with it and so he asked me “did you try sending a frown feedback to the dev team?”. Until he actually suggested that it didn’t cross my mind.

I promptly clicked the “Send a frown”, this brought up an email already typed out, with a screenshot of what I was doing and the formulas I had written, I added some more detail and sent it off.

I also posted on the PowerQuery TechNet forum.

The next day I received a response to my email from the PowerQuery team asking me some questions, at the same time someone who works on the PowerQuery team reached out to me on Twitter and there were two responses waiting for me on the forum, one of which was the solution.

My frown was turned upside down (to a smile), and I learnt a lesson - it’s ok to send a frown from time to time.

The answer was to turn on Fast Combine, but more on that another time. Thanks to all of you who helped me out :)