Consolidating Excel files in Power Query - powerquery

Question

I have followed online instruction that allow me to do this if all of the files that I need are in the same folder.
Whilst all of the files that I need are indeed in my "Downloads" folder, there are other files in there as well.
Where I am getting lost is in editing my list of the files that I want.
When I press edit it takes me to Power Query (where I can filter the files that I want) but when I press Load and save it just creates a list of those files and doesn't allow me to then combine and edit.
I just end up with a list of the files that I wanted to combine!
Could anybody point me in the right direction please?

Answer 1

Below is some code to combine all XLS files in a directory. Add your code starting in the third row to further filter the filenames as needed, then let the rest of the steps proceed to combine them
let Source = Folder.Files("C:\subdirectory\directory"),
#"Filtered Rows" = Table.SelectRows(Source, each ([Extension] = ".xlsx")),
// add another filter here as desired
#"Removed Other Columns" = Table.SelectColumns(#"Filtered Rows",{"Name", "Content"}),
#"Added Custom" = Table.AddColumn(#"Removed Other Columns", "GetFileData", each Excel.Workbook([Content],true)),
#"Expanded GetFileData" = Table.ExpandTableColumn(#"Added Custom", "GetFileData", {"Data", "Hidden", "Item", "Kind", "Name"}, {"Data", "Hidden", "Item", "Kind", "Sheet"}),
#"Removed Columns" = Table.RemoveColumns(#"Expanded GetFileData",{"Content", "Hidden", "Item", "Kind"}),
List = List.Union(List.Transform(#"Removed Columns"[Data], each Table.ColumnNames(_))),
#"Expanded Data" = Table.ExpandTableColumn(#"Removed Columns", "Data", List,List)
in #"Expanded Data"

Answer 2

This might help you work with your info a bit.
To be able to select the files you want to use from the folder, what you want to do is, when you go to get data from folder, click the Transform Data button instead of the pre-selected Combine or Combine & Transform Data button. (Which of the pre-selected buttons you'll see depends upon how you navigated to get data from folder.) After you click the Transform Data button, you'll be presented a table of your folder's contents, with various columns of pertinent info. You can then filter based on the info in the columns and, after filtering, you can click on the button to combine the contents of the filtered files.