Issue with Case Conversion in Power BI Table View

[Ravindra_]

Dear Microsoft Support Team,

I hope you are doing well. We have encountered an issue in Power BI where the case of certain strings is being altered when switching to Table View. This behavior is unexpected and affects data accuracy.

Issue Description:

The data is correctly loaded into Power BI and appears as expected in the Transform Data option. However, in Table View, Power BI seems to modify the case of similar strings automatically.

 I manually created a table with three rows:

1. The first two rows contain the string "English", but with a difference in the case of the last character.
2. The third row contains "SciencE".

When switching to Table View, Power BI makes the "English" string identical in both rows while keeping the third-row string unchanged.

Impact:

• The original case of the data is not preserved in Table View.
• This could lead to inconsistencies in case-sensitive scenarios where exact string representation matters.

Steps to Reproduce:

1. Load data into Power BI.
2. Check the Transform Data option – data appears as expected.
3. Switch to Table View and observe the case change in similar strings.

Expected Behavior:

The original case of the values should be preserved in Table View, just as they appear in Transform Data.

 Could you please advise whether this is an expected behavior or if there is a way to retain the original case of the values in Table View?

Looking forward to your guidance on this.

[danextian · Accepted solution]

Hi @Ravindra_ 

Power BI automatically normalizes text case when loading data, treating "English" and "enGLISH" as the same value and picks whatever gets loaded first. You convert the text to binary and then the binary format to text and append it to the original. Extracting the actual text in DAX will, however, return just the first version that gets stored.

Here's s sample custom column:

let 
toBinary = Text.ToBinary([TextColumn]),
toText = Binary.ToText(toBinary)
in [TextColumn] & "_" & toText

[OwenAuger]

Hi @Ravindra_ 

This is actually by design for Power BI.

I recommend reading this article which describes this behaviour in detail:

https://www.sqlbi.com/articles/letter-case-sensitivity-in-dax-power-bi-and-analysis-services/

To quote the article:

"...when values are inserted into a table, two strings that differ only because of the casing are stored with the same index – thus resulting in the same string."

Generally speaking, the first case encountered when values are loaded to a table is used for all occurrences in that column.

As a consequence, Power BI models are not able to distinguish between values in a particular column that differ only by case. This is a feature of the Power BI version of the Tabular engine that we have to work around, for better or worse.

Regards