Removing columns named “Column” when importing Excel files with Power Query

When importing Excel files using Power Query, any columns without a name in the first row will end up titled “Column123”, with an number at the end that increments for each column. This happens whether they contain actual data, or whether they’re just formatted columns that contain nothing at all.

Example of imported Excel file with two named columns and two just called “Column”.

If you’re importing a single file, you can rename or delete these columns as you need to. However, if you’re importing an entire folder of Excel files or the format changes unpredictably, you may want to automatically remove all o these columns at the end.

To do this, you’ll use the “Advanced Editor” to add a line of M-code:

"Remove Columns Named Column" = Table.RemoveColumns(#"Promoted Headers", List.FindText(Table.ColumnNames(#"Promoted Headers"), "Column")),
After adding the new step, columns named “Column” are now gone.

After you add this step, you may need to modify your “Changed Type” step to only set the type on columns you’re keeping, as it automatically mentions every single column by name.

Adding this step will remove the additional columns, dynamically, every time the data is imported. Now when you import a folder full of Excel files and some of them contain additional columns or rogue formatting, the step will drop them if they don’t get named.

Viewing active (and missing) permissions in SSRS and Power BI Server

To see who has folder/report level permissions in SSRS and Power BI Server, you have to join a couple of tables together – I started with a query I found at StackOverflow and built onto it – here’s my query (it pulls a bit more detail and shows not just permissions granted, but those not granted):

select  case E.Path
		when '' then '/'
			else E.Path
		end as ItemPathAndName,
		concat(LEFT(E.Path, case
			when len(E.Path)-len(E.Name) = 0 then 0
				else len(E.Path)-len(E.Name)-1 end),'/'
		) as ItemPath,
		E.Name as ItemName,
		case E.Type
			when 1 then 'Folder'
			when 13 then 'PBI Report'
			else concat('Unknown (',Type,')')
		end as ItemType,
		case e.PolicyRoot
			when 0 then 'Inherited'
			when 1 then 'Customized'
			else 'Unknown'
		end as PermissionSource,
		C.UserName,
		D.RoleName,
		--D.Description, -- Uncomment for role description
		convert(bit, case when
				a.id is null then 0
				else 1
		end) as ValidPermission
from dbo.Catalog E
cross join dbo.Users C
cross join dbo.Roles D
   left
   join dbo.PolicyUserRole A
     on E.PolicyID = A.PolicyID 
	and A.RoleID = D.RoleID
	and A.UserID = C.UserID
order by Path, C.UserName

Rather than just selecting the permissions, this query actually shows all possible permissions, and shows where users have or don’t have them. In my case, I wanted to see a list of users on the server that lacked access to specific reports and the “show me the permissions” query wouldn’t do that – additionally, this query can show you all the places that your permissions are manually set, rather than inherited.

To interpret them, I copied the results to Excel, created a pivot table, and then filtered using PermissionSource=Customized (to see all the custom permissions) or ValidPermission=0 (to see the places where people didn’t have permission to view an item).

The crossjoins can make the resultset a bit large, but it worked for me. If you want to filter things down a bit, you can add a WHERE clause near the end to folder those columns for the specific situation you’re looking for.

“Your Google account can’t go here” when logging into Chromebook with family link

I didn’t find a good answer online when I ran into this issue, so hoped I can be the answer for people who have this same issue in the future.

We recently got Chromebooks for our kids to support their remote school for the rest of the school year and I wanted to set them up with monitoring – Google has a tool to do that called “Family Link“. We set up accounts for our kids, but unfortunately, we received an error when we tried to log into the Chromebook:

There weren’t any details (and my parent account could log in just fine) – searching online came up with a bunch of frustrated posts that were almost a year old and talking about the change from supervised accounts and how Family Link didn’t work on Chromebooks. I received that error when trying to add a new user or log in – I couldn’t complete either process.

  Looks like your google account can't go here

The secret ended up being that the ChromeOS on my Chromebook was CRAZY out of date – even though it was ordered brand new from Amazon, it was running ChromeOS 56 when the CURRENT VERSION (as of March 2020) IS 80! All of the documentation I saw on Family Link said it that required at least ChromeOS 71 and this obviously wasn’t cutting it. I would have expected a brand new Chromebook to be updated to something near current, but obviously not – according to https://www.chromium.org/developers/calendar, version 56 was released in November 2016 and is over 3 years old at this point

ChromeOS version 56, installed on our Asus Chromebook when we received it.

It doesn’t prompt you to automatically update to a newer version of ChromeOS – you have to do it manually. To do that, go to the system info in the lower-right corner and click on the gear to open settings, then click “About Chrome OS” at the top, then “Check for updates” and apply anything it shows. In our case, it updated to 72, rebooted, and the applied a few more security updates and a few more reboots before it finally landed on 80. Once it did, I could log in with the family link child account, approve my child’s sign on, and we were on the way with no more problems.

Good luck!

Power BI Server – Resolving “Web Portal URLs and Web Service URLs don’t match”

After replacing an expired SSL certificate on Power BI Server, we were no longer able to browse the site – we received an error that “The report server isn’t configured properly… The report server Web Portal URLs and Web Service URLs don’t match”:

We hadn’t changed the Power BI Server settings aside from updating the certificate, but now couldn’t load the site without getting this error message.

We were able to resolve it by manually updating both URLs (Web Service and Web Portal) in Report Server Configuration Manager to the Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) – normally, the HTTP version of the URL is set to “All Assigned” (and shows the server name) and the HTTPS version shows the name on the certificate (in our case, both the old and new certificate had the FQDN). This is how it looked on the other servers that worked:

No obvious errors, but manually changing the HTTP URL for both Service and Portal to FQDN fixed the Power BI Server site – things started to work again instantly. This bothered me, though – none of the other servers needed this setting changed, and they were all perfectly fine with the server short name in the HTTP URL.

Cause/Solution:

The issue ended up being Internet Information Services installed on the same server – even though the primary site was disabled, it was bound to port 80 on all IPs without a host name, so it was claiming the “HTTP://+:80” that Power BI Server was also trying to bind. Because this bind was failing, Power BI couldn’t register matching URLs and gave us the error.

To resolve it, we added a phony hostname to the Default Web Site in IIS (even though it was stopped and shouldn’t have caused an issue) so that that it didn’t claim everything at Port 80:

Once this was done, we set the Power BI configuration back to “All Assigned” and it re-registered its own URLs, and then things started working perfectly again. I’m not sure if IIS was installed by our server admins during our certificate update, or if some other configuration change caused IIS to change how it registered the URL, but this resolved this issue.

Hopefully it helps somebody else!

Installing Access Database Engine 2016 x64 alongside Office x86

In Power BI, you can open XLSX files without any additional drivers, but opening XLSB files requires you to first install the Access Database Engine driver (available for free at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=54920) or you’ll get an error like this:

We encountered an error while trying to connect. Details: "Excel Workbook: the 'Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0' provider is not registered on the local machine. The 64-bit bersion of the Access Database Engine 2010 Access Database Engine OLEDB provider may be required to read.
‘Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0’ provider error message

If you have Microsoft Office installed, you already have this component, but most people use a version of Office that’s x86 – since Power BI is x64, you’ll need the x64 version of the driver as well. However, if you try to install it with Office x86 on your computer, you’ll get this error and you’ll be stuch:

Microsoft Access database engine 2016 x64 Installation Error screenshot - "You cannot install the 64-bit version of Microsoft Access Database Engine 2016 because you current have 32-bit Office products installed. If you want to install 64-bit Microsoft Access Database Engine 2016, you will first need to remove the 32-bit installation of Office products. After uninstalling the following product(s), rerun setup in order to install 64-bit version of Micorsoft Access Database Engine 2016: Office 16 Click-to-Run Extensibility Component"
Microsoft Access database engine 2016 x64 Installation Error screenshot

There’s a way to install both! To avoid this error and install the x64 database engine without removing Office x86, you need to download the installation for the Access Database Engine x64 and run the installation with a command line switch:

AccessDatabaseEngine_X64.exe /quiet
Command to install Access database engine using the "/quiet" switch to run to installation without an error

Once you run this command, you’ll get a black command window for a few seconds, and then it will close once it’s done. To confirm that it’s installed successfully, you can either check for “Microsoft Access database engine 2016” in your Windows “Programs and Features” window, or you can just launch Power BI and attempt to import an XLSB file!

I haven’t noticed any ill effects to doing this, but if you do have issues, comment below.