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hello everyone my name is Barbara
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welcome back to my YouTube channel today
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I'm going to show you how to get a list
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of file names from a folder without any
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VBA or macros we're actually going to
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use Power Query it's really simple but
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really powerful i know you're going to
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enjoy it so let's get started so the
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first thing you need to do is open Excel
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if you haven't already got it opened and
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go to the data tab this will show you
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the get and transform area which is
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where we're going to be working click on
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get data from file and then we're
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looking to take a list of files from a
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folder so click on folder
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now you need to navigate to the folder
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that you want to look at uh mine is on
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my desktop and it's called Excel so I'm
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just going to navigate to that and open
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it up and already we can see there's two
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files in there Excel files and it gives
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the folder path as well and some other
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information when it was created modified
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accessed etc the next thing to do is
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and that will load that data into the
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Power Query editor a really powerful
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interface but we're going to do
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something just really simple today so
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you can see that we've got many columns
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so I only really want the name and let's
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take the date it was created and also
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the folder path now what you can do is
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you can rightclick and remove or remove
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over the columns i tend to use this
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little drop down here and choose columns
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gives me a nice list of columns that I
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can select which ones I want to keep so
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I want to keep the name created and
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folder path so that's a nice little neat
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set of data that I've got the next thing
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I want to do is hit close and load and
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load this information into the Excel
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and I want to show it as a table in the
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existing worksheet let's just pop it on
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and you can see that immediately I know
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what Excel files are in that folder
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which is great so you're probably
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thinking well what if another file you
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know you want to monitor if another file
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has gone into the folder well all we
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need to do is let's drop
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let's drop an extra file into the folder
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so this is great if you're expecting
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files from people and you want to keep
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an eye on it and you you don't want to
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keep navigating to the folder to have a
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look what we can now do is you can
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probably guess we can go to the queries
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and connections and hit refresh all or
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you can actually just rightclick and hit
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refresh and there you go the data has
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updated it has gone and fetched the
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updated list of files from the Excel
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from of Excel files from our folder
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no code no VBA you can let this run and
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just keep refreshing it and you will
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know when a new file has been dropped
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into your folder i hope you enjoyed it
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if you did consider subscribing 90% of
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my viewers aren't subscribed it really
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does help the channel and if you hit the
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when I upload a new video give it a
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thumbs up ask a question in the in the
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comment box below i answer all the
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questions and hopefully see you next
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time for another Excel video thanks for
