#shared: Your new best friend

We’ve all been there…you’re waist-deep in M code, you know there’s some function that will let you transform this list you’ve been working with, but you can’t remember what it is. You can’t use Microsoft’s online documentation because it’s out of date or you’re on an airplane or the wifi is down. What can you do to access all of the function documentation that must be hidden somewhere in Power BI Desktop?

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Enter this little snippet into the Formula Editor’s formula line, and you’ll get a list of all functions available to Power BI–even ones that don’t have online documentation yet.

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Clicking the whitespace next to the Function hyperlinks will show an explanation, syntax, and often an example of how to use the function.

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To make the list searchable, first convert it to a table.

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Then you can use the filter column functionality to narrow the list down to the functions that you are interested in.

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Being able to access a definitive list of Power BI functions, along with syntax and documentation, all from within Power BI Desktop, has been a godsend to me on numerous occasions. Hopefully you’ll find it helpful too!

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