Comparing Table.AlternateRows with List.Alternate in Power BI and Power Query

I must admit that I had more than one unsuccessful attempt to try to fully understand how the List.Alternate-function works. What helped me at the end, was the function Table.AlternateRows. It pretends to be similar to List.Alternate, but holds some surprises that I will uncover in this blogpost:

How Table.Alternate works

Say I have the table below and want to retrieve just the letters that appear in every 2nd row:

I find the dialogue that appears very helpful and intuitive:

It clearly is a removal operation and here I want to remove the 1st row from my table (“1”), and just one at a time. Also want to keep just one row (“A”) before the next one is removed (“2”)  and so on.

In the formula bar, this step will be translated into this M-code:

Table.AlternateRows(Source,0,1,1)

If you would have expected it to be translated to: Table.AlternateRows(Source,1,1,1) instead, you might have forgotten that the M-language in Power Query starts to count at 0, so the first row to remove is expressed by the 0 here.

List.Alternate should work similar

So if my input is a list instead of a table like below, I should expect a similar result than the sample above if I tweak the code a bit, shouldn’t I?

But hey: What’s wrong here? Not a single element has been removed from the list !!

So let’s have a look into the documentation:

and compare it with the Table.AlternateRows documentation:

Hm – at least we have one match here: The “offset” parameter is included in both functions. But it is the first (number) parameter in the Table-function and is at the last position in the List-function. So let’s move it around then like this:

There we are 🙂

So the order of the function parameters is different here. Also the other parameter names are different and their description. I find them much easier to understand in the Table function and of course, the function dialogue there helps to understand what shall happen as well.

Enjoy & stay queryious 😉