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Case sensitive/insensitive option

Power BI Desktop's query editor and M language is case-sensitive, so comparisons between strings will return true only when the casing is identical.

Power BI Desktop's data model and DAX language is not case-sensitive, so string comparisons return true even with different casing.

There should be options to control this for both places.

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Mike Honey shared this idea  ·   ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →

43 comments

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  • Jonathan Prins commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    I am running into this problem when trying to create relationships between tables with case sensitive primary key. Is there any way we could add a feature to switch on and off case sensitivity for relationships?

  • Anonymous commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    I ran in to this when checking city names. Dubois WY is not the same as DuBois PA. It also impacts customer names which is a problem for legal registrations.

  • Hans van Os commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Data quality issues due to incorrect input or system conversion can not be made visible in Power BI because of this unwanted conversion. Please correct this!

  • Stephen commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    I had a little trouble following the fact table solution as I'm a little slow when working late. I stumbled upon a different approach that I think works with a little less work if your case sensitive data to join on is a fixed length.

    This is a bit of a convoluted solution - you convert the case sensitive field to their character code with dashes between them and join on that.  The whole endeavor looks ridiculous in code but it does work.  All my ID's were constant length 15 digit salesforce id's so I just made it big, long, and ugly, but it could probably be converted to something more generic.  While ugly, it's easy to reproduce anywhere the id is and then joins work.  The dashes are to ensure that the stray perfect combination of two and three digit character codes don't overlap in a weird way to make a collision.  Hope it's useful.  I made this a calculated column and joined on it in all the tables that needed the relationship.

    Text.Combine({Number.ToText(Character.ToNumber(Text.At([Id], 0))), "-", Number.ToText(Character.ToNumber(Text.At([Id], 1))), "-", Number.ToText(Character.ToNumber(Text.At([Id], 2))), "-", Number.ToText(Character.ToNumber(Text.At([Id], 3))), "-", Number.ToText(Character.ToNumber(Text.At([Id], 4))), "-", Number.ToText(Character.ToNumber(Text.At([Id], 5))), "-", Number.ToText(Character.ToNumber(Text.At([Id], 6))), "-", Number.ToText(Character.ToNumber(Text.At([Id], 7))), "-", Number.ToText(Character.ToNumber(Text.At([Id], 8))), "-", Number.ToText(Character.ToNumber(Text.At([Id], 9))), "-", Number.ToText(Character.ToNumber(Text.At([Id], 10))), "-", Number.ToText(Character.ToNumber(Text.At([Id], 11))), "-", Number.ToText(Character.ToNumber(Text.At([Id], 12))), "-", Number.ToText(Character.ToNumber(Text.At([Id], 13))), "-", Number.ToText(Character.ToNumber(Text.At([Id], 14)))})

  • Andrew commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    This needs to be added please. I am having issues working with my datasets without being able to use case sensitive with DAX.

  • danextian commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Please allow us to import data with the original case unless explicitly modified in the query editor.

  • Mark commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Problem when using data from Unix systems where upper and lowe case actually mean diffrent things.

  • Anonymous commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Please correct this issue. There should be an option to load data with the original case settings and not automatically change the case.

  • Anonymous commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Agreed; this flaw makes working with Salesforce.com difficult, since (for some odd reason) Salesforce has duplicates of a 15 string alphanumeric ID (for accounts, opportunities etc) and is case sensitive.

  • Andrew Bridson commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    I have a text column that I ingest and it renders fine. Then I create a new column (within M running as a Dataflow) by looping through the text and selecting certain positions in the string using Text.AT() and this all works fine but when I look at it a report it changes.

    Anyone any ideas how to force the correct display same as the original ingested column.

    It seems nuts that PowerBI reports do not display what is actually held in the field.

  • Kushal Farkase commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    We also faced this issue. In our case, we have 3 tables with one common column. We are merging this tables into one using common column. We have two entries with different case. We want them to treat as different. But during merging, Power-BI treating it as one and many to one relationship is violating. We raised a ticket on this one but they said it is product limitation and even there are no alternative. They asked to vote the post on forum, so that they will consider it in update.

  • Anonymous commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Power BI Page level filters are giving both filter values "ABC" and "abc".They should be treated same.When will this be fixed.

  • David Leonard commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    This is a big problem for me as I use case-sensitive values in reports such as having values of "minValue", "MinValue", "minvalue" and "MINVALUE" and PBI is changing the data automatically. Having an option to auto-change text values would be appropriate given the number of users such as myself facing the same issues.

  • Michael Mowle commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    I agree with the below comments. My problems are specific to the Column Headers for my tables which are created using data processed through Power Query. Just ran into the situation today where a Column Name used to be User_ID is now USER_ID and, considering this is a key from linking multiple tables, effectively has my reports "down"

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