Today we will share a short Power BI tip to automatic detect and update data types. Often when we load data into Power BI it looses it’s correct data type or the data type is not recorded correctly. In this blog post we will cover how Power BI can automatically detect and update all columns in a dataset. This post will build on our blog post on data preparation.

This functionality is available in Power Query. Let’s navigate to the table that we would like to be verified and updated in Power Query. We see from our dataset that the columns does not have the correct data type. We also want to update all our columns at once and not column by column.

Press ‘CTRL & a’ in order to select each column. From here navigate to the Transform tab and select Detect Data Type.

This will automatically update all the data types of each column in your dataset. Let’s see the result:

That is it. A short summary on automatic detect and update data types that can save you a lot of time especially when you start building reports. The incorrect data types can waste a lot of time and effort. For more insights on Data preparation you can follow a 7 part blog post series on Data Preparation.

Here is another source with some information on this topic.