Stuck on Partially converting first rows to headers

[Bane]

Hi everyone, it is great to have such a wonderful resource in the form of these forums. To get right to it, I am stuck on Page 40 of the book M is for data monkeys. In figure 59 it is asked to turn the first rows into headers of 5 columns after converting the CSV files into tables and expanding the tables. However, the first column already has the right header. I tried converting only the last 4 columns' first rows into headers, but that did not work out. The command always applies on all columns unjustly turning the date "2/29/2008" into a header.

The book is simply telling you to turn all first rows into headers, which is what I do not want. Am I missing something? Any help would be much appreciated.

 

[Ken Puls]

No, you're not missing anything. You cannot promote some columns and not others. Header promotion is always the entire row.

What I would do in this case is just rename the columns manually, then go to Remove Rows -> Top Rows - > 1. That should have the effect you are looking for.

Alternately, something like this may help: https://www.excelguru.ca/blog/2020/04/07/appending-columns-with-different-names/

 

[Bane]

Thank you for your reply. Wouldn't you effectively be deleting a piece of data (in this case, a date)? See attachment for further explanation.

 

[Ken Puls]

No, that data doesn't have anything to do with that row specifically. If you look at Figure 56, it lists the date next to the Table. The Table contents have no concept of this data. When you expand the Table (Figure 57), every single row of the sub table (including the headers) inherit that date. It's not misaligning anything, every row from top to bottom gets that date. The challenge is that you don't want that in the header, but there is no way to assign different data to different rows in an expand operation.

 

[Bane]

I just redid the entire chapter and with your explanation I finally got it, thank you! Took me long enough :der: