Anonymizing data in Power BI

One of the possible scenarios that could happen to you during your career as a report developer in Power BI is the following. Imagine you are given an Excel dataset to import into Power BI in order to create a report to show to another department of your company. The Excel dataset contains sensitive personal data, such as names and email addresses of people who have made multiple attempts to pay for an order with a credit card. The following is an example of the contents of the Excel file:

Figure 6.4 – Excel data to be anonymized

You are asked to create the report while anonymizing the sensitive data.

The first thing that jumps out at you is that, not only do you have to anonymize the Name and Email columns, but some names or email addresses can be included in the text of some Notes. While locating email addresses is fairly easy using regular expressions, it is not as easy to locate person names in free text. For this...