Data Flows Archives - BI Insight

In 2020, the world celebrated the new year with many uncertainties. Well, life is full of uncertainties, but, this one was very different. The world was facing a new pandemic that never experienced before. The first COVID19 case in New Zealand was confirmed in February 2020. In March 2020 the entire country went to lockdown for the first time. The world was experiencing a massive threat changing everyone’s lives. I was no different. Every day was starting with bad news. A relative passed away; a friend got the virus; the customers put the projects on hold etc. Nothing was looking normal anymore. You can’t even go to get a proper haircut, because everyone is in lockdown. This is me trying to smile after getting a homemade haircut. I bet many of you have done the same thing.

Soheil's Homemade Haircut — Soheil’s Homemade Haircut

One day, I checked my email and saw a message from Packt Publishing. They wanted to see if I am interested in writing a book about Power BI. That was a piece of good news after a long time. I always wanted to write a book about Power BI. Indeed, I attempted for the first time in 2016, but I couldn’t manage to get my ducks in a row to grasp the publishers’ attention.

I was not unfamiliar with writing books; indeed, I wrote my first book back in 2006 about Multimedia Applications in Persian. One of my passions in life is listening to music. And CDs were the most accessible music source with high-quality sound. I recall I saved money for some months, and I bought a Discman to listen to the music on the go. But CDs are rather bulky, and you could not have many of them in your pocket. So the next project was to save even more money to buy an MP3 player. But, converting Audio CDs to MP3 without compromising a lot on the sound quality was a real challenge for many people. And, that was my motive to write my first book in Persian to share my little knowledge with everyone.

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A Power Query Function to Convert HEX, OCT and BIN values to DEC

A while ago I wrote a blogpost on how to use Unicode characters in Power BI. In that blogpost I used a recursive Power Query function to convert Hex values to Dec values. A few weeks back one of my site visitors kindly shared his non-recursive version of Power Query function which beautifully does the job. A big shout out to Rocco Lupoi for sharing his code. So, I decided to share it with everyone so more people can leverage his nice Power Query function. I have touched his code a bit though, but it was more of a cosmetic change, so all credits of this blogpost goes to Rocco. The benefits of his code is not limited to being non-recursive. The code below converts numbers of any base when the base is smaller than 16 like Binary and Oct, so it is not limited to Hex values only. The other benefit of the below code is that it is not case sensitive (note to the digits step on the code below).

Here is the fnHex2Dec function for Power Query:

(input as text, optional base as number) as number =>
let
        values = [
                0=0,
                1=1,
                2=2,
                3=3,
                4=4,
                5=5,
                6=6,
                7=7,
                8=8,
                9=9,
                A=10,
                B=11,
                C=12,
                D=13,
                E=14,
                F=15
        ],
        digits = Text.ToList(Text.Upper(input)),
        dim = List.Count(digits)-1,
        exp = if base=null then 16 else base,
        Result = List.Sum(
                        List.Transform(
                                {0..dim}
                                , each Record.Field(values, digits{_}) * Number.Power(exp, dim - _)
                                )
                        )
in
        Result

As you see in the code above, the base parameter is optional, so if not provided base 16 would be the default.

This is how we can invoke the above function: