Table of Contents
REMOVE EMPTY COLUMNS
Category: Transform / Advanced
Description
This action removes columns with little or no meaningful information. It has three modes:
- Remove columns where all values are empty values
- Remove columns where all values are empty or whitespace
- Remove columns where all values are the same
Use cases
- The action can be helpful, for instance, after importing spreadsheets with sparsely located tables, or where table position changes from a file to file
- It can also be used to remove columns that only contain null replacement values, such as "NULL".
Action settings
| Setting | Description |
|---|---|
| All values are empty values | Removes columns that only contain empty values (nulls) |
| All values are empty or whitespace | Removes columns that contain either empty or whitespace values (e.g. values with only spaces, line breaks, or tabs but no visible characters). |
| All values are the same | Removes columns where all values are the same (e.g. when a column contains only text value "N/A" in all rows). |
Remarks
If the dataset has columns but no data (i.e. no rows), the action does nothing.
Examples
Example: Remove empty columns.
Source dataset:
| Column 1 | Product name | Column 2 | Qty | Column 3 | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Big thing | 1 | 1000 | |||
| Medium thing | 10 | 100 | |||
| Small thing | 100 | 10 |
Action parameters:
All values are empty values.
Result table:
| Product name | Qty | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Big thing | 1 | 1000 |
| Medium thing | 10 | 100 |
| Small thing | 100 | 10 |
Community examples
- Converting Text to HTML (Project; Module: Main; Group: Tab 1; Table: Table 1; Action position: 3)
- My first experiment API + conditional workflow + iteration (Project; Module: Process Network ID; Group: Acquisition data via API; Table: Data from API; Action position: 2)
- My first experiment API + conditional workflow + iteration (Project; Module: Process Network ID; Group: Result; Table: Result;
Action position: 3)