PowerQuery - Fill missing data according to specific pattern - powerbi

Question

I am trying to clean data received from an Excel file and transform it using PowerQuery (in PowerBI) into a useable format.
Below a sample table, and what I am trying to do:
| Country | Type of location |
|--------- |------------------ |
| A | 1 |
| | 2 |
| | 3 |
| B | 1 |
| | 2 |
| | 3 |
| C | 1 |
| | 2 |
| | 3 |
As you can see, I have a list of location types for each country (always constant, always the same number per country, ie each country has 3 rows for 3 location types)
What I am trying to do is to see if there is a way to fill the empty cells in the "Country" column, with the appropriate Country name, which would give something like this:
| Country | Type of location |
|--------- |------------------ |
| A | 1 |
| A | 2 |
| A | 3 |
| B | 1 |
| B | 2 |
| B | 3 |
| C | 1 |
| C | 2 |
| C | 3 |
For now I thought about using a series of if/else if conditions, but as there are 100+ countries this doesn't seem like the right solution.
Is there any way to do this more efficiently?

Answer 1

As Murray mentions, the Table.FillDown function works great and is built into the GUI under the Transform tab in the query editor:
Note that it only fills down to replace nulls, so if you have empty strings instead of nulls in those rows, you'll need to do a replacement first. The button for that is just above the Fill button in the GUI and you'd use the dialog box like this
or else just use the M code that this generates instead of the GUI:
= Table.ReplaceValue(#"Previous Step","",null,Replacer.ReplaceValue,{"Country"})

Answer 2

Yes, like you can do in Excel, you can fill down.
From the docs - Table.FillDown
I believe you will need to sort the data correctly first.
Table.FillDown(
Table.FromRecords({
[Place = 1, Name = "Bob"],
[Place = null, Name = "John"],
[Place = 2, Name = "Brad"],
[Place = 3, Name = "Mark"],
[Place = null, Name = "Tom"],
[Place = null, Name = "Adam"]
}),
{"Place"}
)