Combine All Files in a Folder (Without Excel Tables)

🧠 You can now combine files from a folder when the data is not in structured Excel tables:

  • Use Data > From Folder, then Transform Data (not Combine and Transform or Combine and Load)
  • Filter files before combining to ensure only the correct file types are included (e.g., Extension begins with .xls, Name contains "_data")
  • Click double down arrow on Content column to Combine Files
  • At this point, you can change the Sample file
  • Understand that Power Query attempts to detect headers but may get it wrong without tables
  • Edit the sample file query (Transform Sample File) to fix transformations applied to all files
  • Remove unnecessary rows and promote headers in the sample file (changes to sample file automatically apply to all other files)
  • File name information only available at appended level (use Extract Text transformations to clean it up)

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