Rename applied step in Power Query without waiting for step to refresh

The Advanced Editor approach you mentioned is the only current workaround, but you are right that it requires updating the step name in two places.

You can actually save a bit of time by right-clicking the step, going to properties and rename the step from there.

My Power BI is set in French but it should be the same order: on the screenshot you can see that the "Rename" (Renommer) option is greyed out as the query is loading but "Properties" (Propriétés) is still clickable. This even allows you to type in a short description of what your step is doing which is always a good practice when documenting your code 🙂

However this is still a bit tedious. I wish Power BI offered a native option to automatically change step names to custom names (for ex "Remove other columns" to "SelectCol") because the default names are quite long and filled with spaces which creates this irritating #"Step name" format