Keyword Search in Multiple Columns with Power Query

If you wanted to do a search for keywords in the text of a column or multiple columns you could use the find all feature in Excel. But if this was something where you wanted to bring back the records for those columns that had the keyword and report it back to a stakeholder, you'd want something more complete. Enter Power Query; it can provide the mechanism for you to do keyword search in multiple columns and systematically bring back those rows or records and also take into account the case (i.e., case sensitive words) of the keywords.

Excel Lookup to Return the Last Value

Usually when you're doing lookups in Excel, it brings back the first value that matches. But what if you want the last value and did not want to sort the table to do that? You can actually perform this type of lookup quite easily in Office 365 version of Excel with the XLOOKUP function. But what if you don't have O365? Well you're not stuck, cause you can combine some functions (INDEX, LARGE, IF and ROW) to do the same thing. I'll show examples of both and offer a bonus on how to create a drop down list near the end.

Use the Power Query Data Type Customization

In the Microsoft Office subscription or Microsoft 365 version of Excel there's data types that let you get a lot more information from just one value in a cell. There is a stock data type that lets you view the latest information of that public company like the stock price or shares outstanding; and that is just based on the name of the company in one cell. Now you can actually create you own custom data type courtesy of Power Query. Think of it as a small table or list that you can expand from just one cell in your worksheet. You can have any time of structured table of related information and it all gets encapsulations in one column of multiple row cells. See the video to learn how this can be done.