Forum Discussion
How Do I Avoid Alphabetical Sorting?
You need a numeric or alphabetic column that corresponds to that original sort order, then use that to sort.
"The order in which Power BI receives it" would be an arbitrary order unique to any given query or refresh. It would essentially be completely random. So that wouldn't help you.
The order of the data is not always arbitrary in common, real-life settings. E.g. load a csv file, or make an SQL query with an "order by" clause. If the order is fixed in the source it is preserved in Power BI and sometimes you might want to trust that source. It's not a textbook un-ordered set of relations. So I don't see what is wrong with allowing the table's original order as an option.
The present solution here is: add an order column, go to the table view, sort you labels column by the order column -- but be careful, that is different from sorting the table itself by the order column even though the resulting table looks exactly the same... so make sure you click on your label column then go up to the columns tab and click the "sort by column" button there, not any of the other sorting options... This seems surpising to me for such a simple feature.