Close and Apply Without processing in PBI Desktop

Hi, I stumbled upon this exact same issue myself, and was supprised to find this is not a more mentioned issue.

What I ended up with is not an exact solution to your problem, but I think it may function as a decent workaround.

To limit the number of rows loaded and the local processing after you hit "Close and apply" in PBID, you can use parameters in your queries to filter the tables.

Lets say you got a logfile as a source with a datetime-field and value-field with entries every second for 10 years. You dont want to wait for all those rows to load and process locally - you want to push it to the cloud and let the magic happen there!

In such a case you should be able to avoid this by creating a datetime parameter, and then filter the query by this parameter to limit the number of rows. Hit "Close and Apply", do some report building - in a lightning fast and row-low environment - and publish. Then - after the report is published - change the parameter from the Power BI service and refresh the dataset.

You could probably even use an if-statement based on the parameter in your query to limit the query processing even further and create an identical but empty table instead. Yeah. It shouldn't have been necessary to do this, but until Microsoft creates the much needed "One-Click"-solution, we will have to make due.

Information about editing parameters in the Power BI service can be found here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/service-parameters.