You are reading the article Colleges Encourage Collaboration With A Digital Whiteboard Solution updated in December 2023 on the website Daihoichemgio.com. We hope that the information we have shared is helpful to you. If you find the content interesting and meaningful, please share it with your friends and continue to follow and support us for the latest updates. Suggested January 2024 Colleges Encourage Collaboration With A Digital Whiteboard Solution
A new kind of digital whiteboard may be the stuff of dreams for busy IT support teams who work in higher education — and for end-users who finally have something they can just walk up and use, without training or help.
For educators who embrace the concept of active learning — engaging and collaborating with students, instead of just instructing them in lecture settings — the new Samsung Flip is a uniquely modern spin on the age-old paper flip chart that’s still found in countless classrooms and meeting areas. Shaped like an easel-based flip chart, the Flip is a portable interactive display that allows for easy, instant collaboration.
The Flip’s simplicity and portability will be welcomed by IT support teams working in higher education, who face particular on-the-job challenges daily because:
Technology is often spread out across many floors, buildings and campuses that cover many acres.
Educators and students, when they need help, need it immediately.
Most interactive technologies require initial and refresher training to encourage usage, which often falls on IT support.
The more complicated the technology, the more prone it is to break or lock up — or need parts replacement because a critical connector, dongle or stylus has gone missing.
The Flip, by comparison, has a presence sensor that turns on the display when someone walks within range, or when someone pulls the stylus from its built-in sleeve. Unlike many touch displays, it will work regardless of a dedicated stylus — any writing tool will work and you can open menus and adjust settings with your finger. In fact, the core design principle behind Flip was that it needed to be so intuitive that no user training would be required.
Easy and Inherently Familiar
For educators, this kind of interactive technology, along with solutions geared to huddle spaces, directly addresses a marketplace need for easy, informal and inherently familiar tools for group collaboration. One of Flip’s core attributes is the ability to easily wheel the device around a building, going to where a group is gathered, instead of forcing meetings into rooms with fixed technology — rooms that are often booked and unavailable.
As many as four people can work at once on a Flip display. Users can select markup colors and the thickness of their writing or sketches, and wipe out or correct things by erasing with their hands — without getting ink all over them, because it’s all digital. Writing is very life-like, feeling and looking like a pen on paper.
The Ultimate Guide to Conference Room TechnologyWhite Paper
Download this guide to effectively plan your next meeting room technology upgrade. Download Now
Users can connect their computers to the Flip via standard HDMI, or wirelessly screen mirror content and files from mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. It’s easy to push content like images and videos to the Flip for sharing, illustrating concepts and enhancing discussions. That means in an active discussion, a student can look up a web page or YouTube video that shows exactly what they’re talking about, and get it on the screen for all to see.
Typically, with a conventional flip chart or whiteboard collaboration sessions, someone at the meeting’s end takes a photo of the notes and ideas, so the board can be erased. Or they tear off all the flip chart pages and someone transcribes the notes into a file to store and distribute. With Flip, any work can be captured and digitally stored. As many as 20 pages of content can be contained in a single note, and sorted by scrolling or using built-in search. Notes can be shared by sending emails directly from the Flip, saving to the network, downloading to a USB or simply printing them.
Huddle Up and Collaborate
Huddle spaces for informal, often impromptu meetings are increasingly common in workplace environments, but they also suit college environments. Higher ed institutions are creating huddle spaces throughout campuses: in labs, libraries, classrooms, common spaces and even dorms. They fit wherever students want and need to work together on projects, study, share insights or generate new ideas and plans.
Huddles spaces are particularly valuable when they allow distance-based collaboration, using high-speed connections, wide-angle internet cameras and audio to work with students, instructors or third-party experts located across the campus or across the planet.
Imagine a study team, working on wave energy research in Maine, getting an email and then jumping into a huddle space to talk it through with the senders, based at an Irish research institute.
As with Flip, a new generation of technology is making this kind of collaboration fast and simple. Samsung and HARMAN have collaborated to create a set of huddle space solutions designed to enable easy, productive video conferences. The company’s huddle room solutions have four configurations, from basic video conferencing all the way up to enterprise solutions with ultra high-definition displays, wide-angle HD cameras, touch overlays and smart devices for content sharing.
The Huddle Standard is a streamlined option well-suited to academic environments, with a wide-angle view camera and 1080p display, while the Huddle Premium — a notch up — has UHD displays and an AMX Acendo Vibe conferencing soundbar featuring BYOD-friendly Bluetooth and USB connectivity. Both allow remote participation.
Costs for the Flip and these bundled meeting solutions are budget-friendly, allowing universities and colleges to deploy numerous units, and grow that count as usage rates also grow. The good news for IT decision-makers looking for problem-solving tech? All these solutions are designed to require minimal intervention and support from already busy IT team members around campuses — so workflow goes as smoothly for IT as it does for students.
Learn how Samsung Flip can drive student collaboration and support campus IT departments.
You're reading Colleges Encourage Collaboration With A Digital Whiteboard Solution
Create A Digital Workplace With Dex And Vmware Workspace One
A new Samsung Galaxy smartphone and the Samsung DeX docking station are the only tools you need to create a digital workplace leveraging VMware Workspace ONE. With this new approach, your end users will dock their phone into the DeX station to instantly gain access to all their apps – native, web, cloud, virtual – and virtual desktops. The DeX station connects to their monitor, keyboard and mouse, creating an intuitive desktop experience powered by the smartphone.
Here are the benefits of going mobile with Samsung DeX and VMware Workspace ONE.
Mobile Apps Versus Desktop AppsThe differences between using mobile apps and desktop apps illustrate why it’s beneficial for your employees to use DeX to access their virtual desktops. A mobile device only gives you access to mobile apps. Take, for example, the Microsoft Office productivity suite. The mobile apps for Android are robust, but they aren’t as powerful as the desktop version of the suite. The same goes for many customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), and back-office applications.
Increase Productivity With Samsung DeXWhite Paper
Learn three ways you can save time by docking your phone with DeX. Download Now
Accessing a mobile-powered desktop like DeX lets you do a lot more on your phone, and enjoy a desktop-like user experience while using your mobile apps. But it still doesn’t let you run desktop apps that were created for a desktop operating system.
That’s where desktop and application virtualization comes in. Launching VMware Horizon desktops when working within DeX gives you both. You’re now working on a virtual desktop with full desktop apps. You’re viewing content on a full-sized monitor, and using the keyboard and mouse to get work done. And it’s all powered by your Galaxy smartphone. That is the digital workplace, powered by mobile.
Virtual Desktop Access on DeXYou can also go one step further than just productivity applications by using 3D apps on DeX and Horizon, which allow engineering and design firms to gain unprecedented mobile access for their workers. The technology also lends itself to more flexibility in briefings, as firms can place a DeX station in their conference rooms, hook up to a monitor and let presenters simply dock their smartphones and present their latest work. With Horizon, DeX users will also experience Blast Extreme adaptive transport for high-performing cloud applications and virtual desktops— right from Samsung Galaxy S8, S8+ and Note8 devices.
Likewise, this setup also improves continuity of operations (COOP) by providing employees with another way to work remotely, as long as they have a DeX station.
These technologies running on Samsung DeX can even help your organization further evolve siloed cloud applications and develop a platform approach that improves the overall user experience of your back-end applications.
Enhancing the Digital WorkplacePairing your Samsung Galaxy smartphone with DeX and Workspace ONE can give you access to your virtual apps and desktops from a single multifaceted device that handles your productivity, communication and collaboration needs. This solution also provides secure device management, making it ideal for a mobile-first workforce, frequent travelers and even hot deskers who want flexibility without sacrificing the full power of desktop applications they need to do their work.
See the full capabilities of this technology at the VMworld conference in Las Vegas.
Creating A Subscription Management Solution: An Interview With The Ceo & Coo Of Revuto
Keeping track of online subscriptions and paying for them can be an exhaustive process since often, people lose track of the plans and platforms they have subscribed to. By combining the speed and cost-effectiveness of cryptocurrencies with the practicality of fiat, Revuto is changing the way people pay for their subscriptions.
Revuto has been designed as a DApp on the Cardano blockchain and it leverages the native Cardano tokens and DeFi to pay for subscriptions. Users can keep a track of their subscriptions with easy activation and deactivation and approve, block, or snooze them as per their requirements.
In conversation with AMBCrypto, Jos Majic, CEO, and Vex Vukman, COO of Revuto, got candid about the platform, the REVU token, its public sale, and the motivations behind creating a subscription management solution.
1. What were the motivations behind Revuto, a subscription management solution, connecting its payment systems to crypto? What do you foresee will be the role of digital currencies in the future?
Revuto solves the problem we believe everybody has. The subscription economy is growing 100 YoY and with its free-trial traps, overcomplicated and hidden unsubscribe procedures, with small monthly payments that we all forget about, subscriptions are eating our money.
With Revuto we plan to change that. By leveraging crypto and DeFi services with subscription payments, Revuto sends power back into the hands of users by allowing them not only to control to whom, when, and what they’re paying but to pay less and save their money.
2. In a recent edition of Cardano360, CEO Majic spoke about how Revuto will be using its native token REVU to build an ecosystem with a closed-circuit economy. Can you please elaborate on that?
Revuto setup works in favor of the consumer so whenever the consumer pays for the subscription with the Revuto debit card he gets rewards in REVU tokens. More importantly, whenever a referred friend does the same, the users get a percentage of that transaction in REVU tokens.
Lastly, Revuto users can stake their REVU tokens in liquidity pools and earn yields while providing liquidity to others through micro-lending and borrowing. In short, Revuto allows its users to make their money work for them.
3. How would you describe the utility of the REVU token? How has the reaction to the private round been?
Revu token is a token with limited supply working in a self-sustainable setup where there’s a constant demand (buying pressure) on REVU with the goal to use REVU to pay less compared to what users would usually pay with fiat money.
4. The REVU Token public sale will begin on the 18th of May on Cardano. What are your expectations for the same?
Yes, soon we’ll launch our Public Token sale which is actually the first Public token sale on Cardano. As REVU is Cardano’s native token and our token sale platform is custom-built on Cardano, accepting ADA for REVU only, we believe we can set the steppingstone for other Cardano projects to follow.
Being the first to set up a project on a long-awaited Cardano’s ecosystem brings us into the focus so the expectations are high not only from the Cardano community but from the crypto community in general.
5. What aspects and factors did you consider before choosing Cardano over other blockchains such as Ethereum?
First of all, building our business on Ethereum would make no sense because nobody would use our token to pay 12 Euros to Netflix and 30 for the transaction fees. In that sense, the Ethereum network has big scalability issues. For those who didn’t know, Cardan is a 3rd generation blockchain with very secure and fast transactions.
The token itself brings voting power (governance) what is a key driver to build a community of incentivized users. Then there’s a Cardano foundation and the community that’s one of the biggest supporters in the industry, and lastly, on our team, there are team members working directly for Cardano (IOHK) who’re helping us to do things right. When you combine all the aspects, the Cardano choice was obvious.
6. What can you tell us about the significance of the launch of Revuto dApp on Cardano? According to you, what would be the measure of its success?
The measure of success would be the number of users which we could get to use both, our dApp and the Cardano native token built on the Cardano network. In that retrospective, we’re already gaining tremendous momentum because, as we speak, Revuto is getting close to almost 1M early signups.
7. After the distribution process is over, Revuto will be introducing token staking onto its platform. As a product user, what benefits might I expect from staking my REVU tokens and locking them up in a smart contract?
Benefits for staking REVU are both for the REVU holder and for the Revuto users. Microlending and borrowing setup is there to help other Revuto members solve their short-term cashflow problems but on the other hand, staked REVU can bring a decent monthly yield to cover monthly subscription charges on its own.
8. What benefits might a user get by participating in the Revuto Referral Program?
Apart from being awarded for every referred friend that will come and use Revuto, the referral program is set up to bring its users a decent passive income as long as referred friends are using Revuto to pay their subscriptions.
9. Revuto plans to partner with other crypto exchanges to ensure more trading pairs against REVU in the future, with several listings expected by September. Can you tell us which exchanges you are working with right now?
Unfortunately, we’re not allowed to talk about those exchanges until we’re sure the partnerships are signed, especially because the outcome of those partnerships depends on the success of our Token Sale.
For more information check out their socials-
Website — Visit Site
Whitepaper — Read Whitepaper
Telegram — Join Group
Telegram — Join Channel
Twitter — View Twitter Account
Medium — View Medium Page
Pioneering Decentralized Crypto Payment Solution: Interview With Airswift Ceo
Airswift is a Web3 Fintech company building a decentralized crypto payment platform built around the core objective of connecting merchants with Web3 payment acceptance solutions. It’s designed in a way that empowers businesses to expand their digital currency acceptance, enabling digital asset holders to make frictionless purchases.
Airswift has recently launched its centralized crypto payment gateway – Airswift Connect and is expected to release one of the first decentralized crypto payment protocols in the next month. With the mission of ̣connecting businesses with customers from the universe to the metaverse, Airswift is all set to help merchants enter a prosperous digital world.
In an interview with Dr. Yan Zhang, the CEO of Airswift, we talked about the decentralized payment protocol and its mission and vision, as well as Airswift’s pre-seed funding, new product launch, future roadmap, and much more.
1) What was the thought process behind designing Airswift’s products? Talk us through your mission and vision for Web3 payment platforms.
Exchange, payment, and wealth management are the three cornerstones of the financial services world. While there are decentralized exchange and wealth management platforms, the industry is lacking decentralized payment gateway products, which are needed to transition from centralized to decentralized fintech infrastructure.
For instance, centralized gateways bring custody risk if the provider defaults, while this isn’t an issue with decentralized solutions. And unlike centralized gateways, decentralized payment protocols enable payment using whatever currency there’s a market for. Also, decentralized solutions reduce the cost and friction of cross-border payments.
There are two reasons why people haven’t made a decentralized gateway yet. First, you need the right technology to execute privacy protection for on-chain transactions. Second, payment is a specialized industry with many regulatory requirements, and meeting them is a challenge that requires an in-depth understanding of Web2 payment systems.
Our team is overcoming these challenges by applying their expertise in both financial services and Web3 technologies. And although we’re a Web3 payment protocol, our most important mission is to connect merchants with customers and to bridge the gap between Web2 and Web3.
2) How have your crypto payment solutions performed since their launch? Could you elaborate on the achievements and hurdles that came along the journey so far?
After starting operations in the summer of last year, we have released our key product–the crypto payment gateway–and attracted some pilot customers for it, including payment service providers who want to incorporate crypto solutions, and small shops who want to accept crypto for different purposes. Some want to attract younger customers, while others want easy cross-border transactions.
We’ve also spent the past half year building up our infrastructure, working hard on the payment gateway and settlement solutions.
Our biggest hurdle is building connections between the Web2 and Web3 worlds, because currently regulators are extremely cautious, and the overall market is tough. So we need to make sure compliance managers at organizations are confident about our approach to handling the information and fund flows for crypto transactions, which are different from those for transactions using traditional currencies.
3) With certain limitations surrounding the crypto space, how does Airswift respond to the industry’s challenges?
The number one challenge in the industry is the speed of innovation. The regulation process lags behind innovation, so issues arise that we have to solve ourselves.
Airswift is tackling this problem through transparency measures: due to a lack of regulation, central exchanges are experiencing fraud. But have you ever seen decentralized exchanges fail because of fraud? No, because everything is on-chain and transparent, meaning every transaction is auditable. Our decentralized payment protocol brings similar transparency– it doesn’t leave room for anyone to conduct fraud.
The second big industry challenge is privacy protection. Without this, people won’t want to export their business dealings to the blockchain. We’ve put a lot of effort into working with international standards committees like W3C to ensure we’re on the same page with privacy protection.
4) What are the different features of the decentralized payment protocol? How do they make it stand out from the rest?
First, the decentralized payment protocol is liquidity pool-based, as access to crypto liquidity is needed to facilitate the many sporadic fund transfers required by merchants.
We build our liquidity pool together with all merchants using our gateway. The pool generates interest to liquidity providers, which is risk-free because liquidity contributions remain in the pool and do not accrue an impermanent loss.
We are also executing our mission to reduce the cost of crypto payments for merchants and consumers. Crypto payments should be cheaper than fiat because a lot of the fees associated with fiat payments do not apply to crypto.
5) Tell us more about ‘Airswift Connect’, your centralized crypto payment gateway. How important is it for the crypto space?
The gateway is designed to make your crypto transactions–particularly your e-commerce transactions–smooth. It can process crypto payments from e-wallets, credit cards, and gift cards.
To use Connect, you can incorporate a plugin into your Woocommerce or Shopify backend. So there are lots of benefits to the gateway–it’s trying to make your life easier by letting you enjoy the low cost and high convenience of crypto transactions.
6) What role does your on/off ramp service play? How beneficial is it for the users in the Web 3.0 world?
Smooth on-ramp and off-ramp transactions are very important because although our mission is to bring everyone into Web 3.0, people still have to pay their bills in fiat. And since offramps are taxable events, we work with licensed partners for crypto-fiat conversions while also trying to make the process quick and low-cost. For example, we provide T+0 off-ramp services at a minimal cost.
7) What impact did Airswift’s recent pre-seed funding round have on its investors?
We’re very selective about our choice of seed investors because even though all investors are great, it’s even better to attract investors who’re specialized in your project’s area. Our CEiC investors are very specialized in fintech and come from one of the top ten fintech investment firms.
Our lead investors have helped give us a good market image, which has helped us gain interest from other investors. The temporary market isn’t great so we’re looking to announce other investments when market conditions change.
8) What community engagement activities are being planned for Airswift users?
Airswift uses a B2B2C community engagement model: we work with businesses to serve customers. Our approach to community growth is different from those taken by purely Web3 native projects, and that’s one reason we are talking with AMB crypto–because we are more engaged in the professional community.
But particularly with our DeFi products, a lot of consumers will jump in later on. Airswift is planning to launch its token sometime this year, which allows the general public to explore one of the first payment-based DeFi products.
9) What lies ahead on the Airswift roadmap? Tell us more about it.
Our decentralized payment protocol is going to have its official release in a month. Hopefully, by Q2 of this year, we’ll have our starting user-based established for it. Then the job is to build up the volume of our liquidity pools to best serve the industry.
How To Go Contactless With Ehopper’s Point Of Sale Solution
Self-service retail and hybrid delivery models were fast-growing trends even before COVID-19 — and they’ll remain popular after. Modern consumers expect a seamless shopping experience between online and in-store interactions, as well as more convenient ways to shop. Forward-thinking businesses have met those demands by offering contactless checkout, online ordering, local deliveries and curbside pickup — services that have quickly become standard.
Some small merchants had already begun their digital transformation, adopting cloud-based point of sale (POS) solutions like eHopper to enable self-checkout, virtual payments and loyalty rewards programs. Other small retailers and restaurants are playing catch-up, ditching their old cash registers and manual processes in favor of mobile solutions and automated workflows — not just for the sake of innovation, but for increased ease, speed and safety as well.
Wherever you are on the digital transformation spectrum, eHopper can help. Its app-based POS solution is built specifically for small businesses and offers a new suite of features that will help you keep customers safe and satisfied.
The evolution of eHoppereHopper was created in 2023 by its sister company, B2B Soft, a leading POS vendor for major wireless carriers. Many independent wireless retailers in these networks also own other types of shops or restaurants. When those entrepreneurs started inquiring about cloud-based POS solutions for small businesses, B2B Soft quickly realized there weren’t any available.
“Despite a lot of competition for retail point of sale, there was really no affordable, easy-to-use solution for small retailers,” says Vladimir Basin, eHopper’s general manager and head of product. “Even mom-and-pops needed to invest $20,000 to $25,000 in hardware and learn complicated systems. So we created an easy-to-use POS solution that works on any device. You just download the app, create an account, enter your products, activate your credit card processor and start ringing up sales in days instead of weeks.”
eHopper launched with five core components: payment processing, inventory management, customer relationship management (CRM), employee management and data reporting. Soon, they were asked to incorporate features such as online ordering, mobile pay, loyalty programs and self-serve functionality.
Contactless for customer safetyFor safety and convenience alike, contactless service is now a top tech trend. eHopper has already added digital menu functionality that lets customers scan a QR code to view a restaurant’s menu, then order and pay — all directly from their smartphones. Now, eHopper is developing a QR-based solution that lets retail customers scan and pay for in-store merchandise with their phones.
eHopper’s solution includes other features, such as e-commerce, online ordering and contactless payment options like mobile pay. Merchants can even use the solution to create self-serve ordering stations in restaurant or self-checkout stations in retail shops.
“Businesses can install the app on a tablet and put it in kiosk mode, so customers have fewer face-to-face interactions with merchants,” explains Basin. “That helps with social distancing and reduces the number of staff members on the premises, which lessens the safety risks and the payroll costs.”
Because eHopper is a cloud-based system, managers can access the reporting features from anywhere, including the comfort and safety of home.
Benefits of eHopper point of sale solutioneHopper’s value extends far beyond COVID-19. Even in normal times — or whatever “new normal” is on the way — your business can expect the following benefits:
Faster sales: You can get eHopper’s solution as an all-in-one mounted tablet with credit card reader, or you can download the app on multiple mobile devices. This way, waiters can place customer orders directly from their tables, rather than jotting down orders on paper and then entering them on a computer. With streamlined communication, the kitchen staff can start preparing orders without a hitch. And when the customer’s ready to pay, the waiter can print a ticket — or better yet, the customer can pay directly from their phone. Likewise, retail customer service reps can use tablets to check store inventory and even ring up small purchases, saving customers a trip to the checkout line. Retailers can also speed up sales by installing self-checkout stations.
Fraud detection: Traditional cash registers provide limited ability to trace sales, says Basin. “Cashiers just count the items being bought, ring up the sale, process the credit card and provide a receipt,” he explains. “With eHopper, every sale is mapped to an employee who processes the sale and also it tracks which items are being bought. Being able to trace sales helps to minimize fraud, which is critical.”
What’s the best tablet for your business?White Paper
Take this quick assessment to see which Samsung tablet would best support your business needs. Download Now
Scalability: Whether your small business has one, two or 200 stores, eHopper’s solution can support and connect them all. “We provide multistore, multiregister functionality, meaning that our system tracks sales across stores and provides inventory visibility and reporting across the stores. We also provide location-based taxes, so if a business has different stores with different taxation, the system knows that.”
Better customer experience: eHopper allows your staff to be more efficient and informed. The inventory management functionality helps you keep high-demand products in stock. And the CRM feature provides full visibility into individuals’ purchase history so you can personalize marketing messages. You can also use the solution to survey customers about their experience and offer loyalty rewards programs.
Getting started with eHopperAs soon as you sign up for eHopper and create an account, eHopper will send you a welcome email with onboarding instructions and complimentary video training sessions. You can also get one-on-one training, attend weekly webinars for additional information or call any time for phone support.
Discover more essential apps to empower your growing business — and explore exclusive business pricing, financing and trade-in options and other deals on everything from phones and tablets to monitors and memory.
Dimension Table In A Text File: Power Query Solution
In this blog post, I’ll go over problem #2 from the ongoing Problem of the Week at the Enterprise DNA forum, where we discussed how to sort messy data into a clean dimension table. This is the second iteration of this new initiative that we’re hosting at Enterprise DNA. I’m especially passionate about this series because it provides everyone the chance to get more practice on a regular basis. You can watch the full video of this tutorial at the bottom of this blog.
On the first Wednesday of each month, there’s a DAX challenge and on the third Wednesday, there’s a power query challenge.
This is a great opportunity to explore, discover, and learn new things about these languages that you need to leverage inside Power BI.
You’ll find a category on the Problem of the Week at the Enterprise DNA forum.
The primary focus is all about the process and not so much on the outcome.
If you’re successful in breaking down a problem into smaller pieces, you’ll be able to solve any problem that you’re faced with.
Melissa de Korte
Brian previously spoke about a technique called rubber duck debugging. If you missed that, be sure to check out his video. It can help you when you get stuck on these challenges.
First, let’s examine the task at hand. We have a messy text file that we need to transform into a proper dimension table.
Now, when I look at data like this, for the most part, it’s going to be all about text cleaning, removing unwanted characters, trimming, capitalizing words, and so on.
But we also need to retrieve all the rows from this stack data and turn it into a single line for each country. I’m calling it stack data because all the field names are repeated in a single column for each country.
I have some experience in Excel, and one of its most powerful features in my view is pivot tables.
Pivot tables let me view data segment by segment. Depending on what you place on the row section, a pivot table condenses each occurrence of that segment into a single line.
You can then split that up even further by dragging fields into the column section.
I’ve created an example of what this looks like. Here, we have pretty much the same data that we had in the text file.
And on the next page, I’ve created an empty pivot table.
Now, what I didn’t show you is that I have three columns here instead of the two that I’ve already showed you.
I’m going to drag my segment to the rows.
Since Column 1 had the field names, I’m going to drag that to the column section.
Column 2 had all the field values, so I’m going to drag that into the value section.
We can see here that the pivot tables can’t handle text strings. It counts them, but it does show that we have a single value for each field.
Now let’s take a look at that segment that I created. So I’m going to go back to the Data and I’m going to unhide my column. You can see that it’s just an index number, identifying each of the separate blocks of the data that are still stacked on top of each other.
So for me, the key transformation will be a pivot of the data to get it back into that tabular format.
In the forum, I’ve seen other ways of dealing with this. There are other ways to get to a tabular format aside from using a pivot action and they work equally well. If you’re interested in that, go to the forum and start exploring.
Let’s go over the power query and review my solution.
Personally, I think the UI does a great job of writing the bulk of the M code for us. So I tend to design my queries using the user interface as much as I can.
This is my base group that is built using the user interface.
You can see that there are a lot of steps in the applied steps on the right hand side.
Now that in itself is not a problem, but just by looking at these steps, you can see that there are a lot of transformations that can be grouped together.
We see that this query has 31 steps.
The first thing I did was to remove the change type step. I suggest creating a custom function to do all of these text transformation steps.
The second is the pivot step to turn this type of data back into a proper tabular format.
Let’s go back to the early stages of building out my query, where I had all those grouped steps to clean up these texts: column 1 and the merged column.
I also added an additional custom column. Its sole purpose is to build out my custom text cleaning function. I invoked that on the merged column.
This way, I don’t have to write the function in one go, but build it up gradually one step at a time, adding a new transformation after reviewing the results from the previous step.
Let’s look at the M code for the text cleaning function.
As you can see, I have multiple steps. When I was building this text function, I went back and forth between the query to look at the results to see what to build and what to correct next.
With this result, I performed all the transformations that I needed. Some of the M functions that I used here were provided by the user interface when I built my initial query, like the Text. Trim function. However, the other functions used were not.
If you’re not familiar with them, you can look up all the M functions in the M formula guide online. This is the link where you need to go.
You will find a section dedicated to power query and functions.
If you scroll down, you’ll find the section on text function and each section starts with an overview. There’s a list of all the text functions inside the power query and formula M language.
If you’re looking for a specific transformation, you can look that up right here.
The second part I wanted to highlight while creating this dimension table is the pivoting of the data itself. Let’s take a closer look at this as well.
I started by adding an index. I updated that index to properly segment the blocks of data. I did this by returning the index number for each line where it had the text country in column 1, and then I filled that value down.
It’s going to use Column 1’s values as the new column name. It also wants to know where the values for those field names are. Those are in our merged column.
The image above is the final result query. I do hope you’ve enjoyed how we’ve reshaped the messy data in the provided text file and turned it into a clean dimension table that’s suitable for analysis.
If you’ve enjoyed this blog post, please subscribe to the Enterprise DNA channel so that you don’t miss out on any new content.
I hope to see you all in future Problem of the Week challenges.
Melissa
Update the detailed information about Colleges Encourage Collaboration With A Digital Whiteboard Solution on the Daihoichemgio.com website. We hope the article's content will meet your needs, and we will regularly update the information to provide you with the fastest and most accurate information. Have a great day!