Delimiter issue when extracting .csv and loading to PowerQuery in Excel

Question

Hi all,

I was wondering if anybody had come across this issue before...

I have a workflow that takes a large server-based dataset and transforms it with a series of formulas, mappings, cleaning etc. before being written to a .csv file which I then load into an Excel file via PowerQuery and share with others on a monthly basis.

The issue is that when it gets loaded into the Excel it seems to 'skip' a selection of the dataset and leaves all of the fields that I'm extracting merged together as one in the the first column (I've tried changing the first column to another field but that hasn't resolved it), so essentially ignoring the commas that I have set as a delimiter.

I don't necessarily think the issue is in the workflow itself, but rather in the way I'm outputting it and then loading to Excel but I could be wrong!

Does anybody know why this might be happening and how I can go about resolving it?

Cheers! :)

Biswarun · Answer

@acorro22 Please provide a minimal reproducible example.

acorro22 · Answer

Hi Luke_C

The output from Alteryx contains too many rows for Excel to handle, so I extract a .csv which is connected to the file as a source only (rather than being embedded into it).

I send this out to a number of people that use it for varying purposes and different analyses so having all of the data sitting behind it is necessary. Additionally, not many of the end users have access to Alteryx, or may not be able to produce such analysis on Alteryx.

I would hardly say I'm the most experienced of Alteryx so there could be something I'm missing but this is the way I've been doing it to date. Happy to explore other options though if it helps solve the issue!

Thanks

Luke_C · Answer

To take a step back, what's the reason for using power query over continuing to use Alteryx to produce the excel file?