Formula powerfx field questions

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Posted on by scottdjung

I thought I was going to have a super easy thing to do.

I want to take a name and create a field that has it in the correct order... NO... I don't want to go to settings and select my preference. For reasons outside of this question pretend that a Name column holds "Last, First". I wanted to make it First Last. (not a settings thing)

Calculated fields don't have the requisite things, so I'm actually happy that I am forced to learn more power fx. Simply, I figured a Concat (second part, " ", first part) shouldn't be that hard. I should look for the comma and use it. I expected something like this to work

Concatenate(

Right(name, Len(name)-Find(",",name)-2),

" ",

Left(name, Find(",",name)-1)

)

Or similar. I have reached the point of I can get the Left(name,10) - hard coded number)

And I can even do Left(name,Len(name))

but for some reason any time I add a "Find" to it, it won't save.

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Dynamics 365 general

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Adis 6,069 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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Hey,

I dont know the answer to be honest. However, the way I would approach it is using the format data by example in Power automate.

Use format data by examples to change the format of data with Power Automate - Power Automate | Microsoft Learn

Although, you are not using power automate, you can use it to create an expression and learn how it works.

From your example the following expression would be created.

Kind regards, Adis

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Tom_Gioielli 2,800 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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The functions available with PowerFX in Dataverse is limited compared to what can be used in Canvas Apps.

Formula reference - Dataverse formula columns - Power Platform | Microsoft Learn

I think the goal is for them to have more parity, as evidenced by the long announced (but not yet implemented) feature for replacing rollup fields with Formula columns, or the fact that you still can't return a currency value at all. It's just a current limitation that we need to work around until it is hopefully implemented in the future.

To your current requirement, I agree with @Adis that Power Automate can do the job. You might also look into a Data Flow. Since those use Power Query, you would be able to split apart columns by delimiter, recombine, and then update the Dataverse record and it could be done much quicker and with lower overhead than the Power Automate flow (provided this can be done on a regularly scheduled basis instead of on demand).

Hope the link above helps, and good luck. It's frustrating when these little things seem to cause such a big headache.

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