How to handle Blanks and Nulls in Power BI
summary
Power Query treats nulls as unknown so any arithmetic or concatenation with them returns null unless replaced early in the ETL (recommend handling in the silver layer or using double question mark coalesce or null-aware functions). The semantic model (DAX) treats missing values as blanks that convert to 0/""/date 1899-12-30/false unless tested with strictly equal (==). Referential-integrity gaps add a blank row in dimension that VALUES, ALL and SUMMARIZECOLUMNS reveal; replacing blanks in DAX can break performance during context transitions.
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chapters (5)
- 0:00Handling blanks and nulls
- 1:57Nulls in Power Query
- 8:26Semantic model with DAX
- 16:51Blank row propagation in DAX
- 19:20Summary & Q&A
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