Share your thoughts on the New Power Query experience in Power BI Desktop (Preview)

[miguel]

We’re excited to begin rolling out the new Power Query experience in Power BI Desktop, starting with the release of a redesigned Get Data experience (Preview) in the May 2026 update—and we’d love your feedback.

What is the new Power Query experience?

We’re modernizing Power Query to deliver a more consistent, accessible, and streamlined data preparation experience across Microsoft Fabric, Power BI, and Excel.

This release is the first step, focused on Get Data, with a modernized Power Query Editor experience planned for later this year.

What’s new in this release?

The new Get Data experience has been redesigned to help you discover and connect to data faster:

• Improved data source discovery — A unified, easier-to-navigate experience to find all your data sources
• Streamlined connection flow — Fewer steps to connect so you can get started quickly
• Built-in accessibility — Full keyboard navigation and dark mode support out of the box

Greater consistency — Aligned experience across Fabric, Power BI Desktop, and Excel

How to try it

The new Get Data experience is available as a Preview in the May 2026 release of Power BI Desktop. To enable it:

File > Options and settings > Options > Preview features > New Power Query experience

 

We want your feedback!

This is just the beginning, and your input will directly shape the broader Power Query experience. We’d love to hear:

• What do you like? What improvements stand out to you?
• What's missing? Are there data sources or workflows you expected to see?
• What could be better? Did you run into any friction or unexpected behavior?

Share your thoughts in the replies below—whether quick impressions or detailed feedback, every comment helps.

To learn more, see New Get Data experience in Power Query.

Thank you for helping us shape the future of Power Query!

[ihhdma042024]

I have to say I'm baffled by losing the ability to select my ODBC connections from a dropdown menu. That was a wonderfully convenient flow, given that I have dozens and dozens of ODBC connections. It seems so unnecessary to have to open my ODBC manager to check if I've remembered the alpha-numeric string correctly.

[andaclacter]

I like the UI but I don't love that the ability to add in custom SQL statements when linking to a Snowflake database has either been disabled or hidden. This is a useful addition to the data ingestion step that my team will sorely miss if it's removed from production.

[mdias]

Totally agree with this. This is a must and help keep queries efficent. 

[connor_morgan]

That added "feature" is baffling to me..

[bankimsie]

I don't find the usgae metric semantic models with this view. I then had to navigate via:  New -> Power BI semantic models. This needs to be fixed.

[zbenito]

I just want to say that the new experience is completely useless without the Native Query ability for certified connectors.  It should never have released without this feature.  We will be using legacy and I hope the option does not go away before you fix this very glaring issue.  This is a huge gap. 

[kirillperian]

@miguel,

I know you and I discussed this separately and this idea needs a lot of upvoting, but I just think that it's such a necessary and basic product feature that is very useful and a huge time saver in daily work. Most of Power Query professionals are probably too busy developing queries and are not complaining about the lack of this or upvoting the idea, but I really believe that lumping it together into a global search bar is going to bring in a lot of unnecessary (and unrelated) results, where the goal is to keep the search focused on query names only. So if it's in the category "Important, Urgent and Low Level of Effort to implement", I think you should consider pushing it up in the backlog. 

https://community.fabric.microsoft.com/t5/Fabric-Ideas/Add-Search-Functionality-to-Power-Query-quot-...

[Daniel_H]

I really like the new experience, specifically the emphasis on the Search bar to quickly find the connector. One suggestion I had for improvement is to replace the OneLake Catalog section with a favorites section. Or another option is you could expand the new sources section to include frequently used connectors that populate automatically. 

[miguel]

We do plan to bring the Recents experience that you see in Power Query Online which actually has a way to favorite queries and it also enables you to connect to either the data source or the exact query that you used, so its a much more comprehensive approach and modernization of the legacy Recents experience. The work on that will start sometime towards the end of this year as our main goal at the moment is stability with the current release and making sure that we are able to provide the full Power Query experience later this year.

[bob_0521]

When I try to build a new Snowflake connector, there is not an option to create a SQL Statement in the connector.

New connection screen:

With the old interface, there is an option to enter a SQL statement.

How can users create their own Snowflake SQL Statement instead of pulling in the full table?  I noticed with the Azure SQL database, the SQL Statement option is still available.

I have just trained our users on the strength of using custom SQL statements against Snowflake to acheive better performance.  This is a huge step backwards for us.

Thanks,

[connor_morgan]

This problem needs to be escalated there was so little foresight in deployment, this was either intentional by Microsoft to lower the value of Snowflake, or they have no idea what they are doing.

[zbenito]

That's 100% what microsoft is trying to do.   They know exactly what the yare doing. 

[miguel]

Thanks for the feedback!

We hear you loud and clear about how important the Native Query is to you for this connector. 

Some connectors have different implementations for each other. The ones being affected by this gap are the certified connectors that are created using the Power Query SDK. It's a UI gap in the modern UI which is something that you can also see in the web modeling experience as well as any other Power Query Online experience.

In regards to the question around how do users bring their data instead of pulling the full table? That's actually the beauty of Power Query and query folding 🙂 assuming that the connector has support for query folding, it'll never try to pull the full table and instead you can apply the transformations that you need in the query editor itself. Even the data preview being rendered in the query editor uses query folding to only load the top N rows required to show the data preview.

Nevertheless, going back to the main topic, we intend to address this general gap for all certified connectors that support native query, but for the time being we do recommend using the legacy experience for that particular scenario. For any other scenario, please do let us know your feedback and what you think about the new OneLake catalog experience as well as the view on the Recents module.

Thanks again!

[spiritofme]

1. Source list should be customizable for the user. Everyone has their own set of normally used sources and 90% of the time those aren't going to be the ones that are listed.

2. Custom query is absolutely necessary for and/all SQL sources (MySQL, Oracle, etc.). Selecting a recent source that was a custom query will load that custom query and not the source to enter a custom query...that's quite annoying. And since it only shows the source and nothing about the custom query you just see a big list of the same source with no idea which is what query.

3. PLEASE DEAR GOD add the ability to expand the custom query text box!!! It's limited to a few lines and it would be very nice to be able to expand it to see more code. This has been a source of frustration for more than 10 years now.

[BONUS: ability to search for text within the custom query code text box would be absolutely amazing!]

[miguel]

Thanks for the feedback!

I went ahead and created some ideas to track your requests. 

For #1 it would be: Personalized Source List in Get Data - Microsoft Fabric Community

We are working on bringing back the Native Query field. For the other feedback around connecting to a recent source from a query that is against a native query, we actually have an improved experience in Power Query Online that we plan to bring to the desktop experience with something called "Browse location". No ETA yet, but the plan is to bring it and have parity with what the Power Query Online experience provides as today it simply tries to match the experience from the legacy UI:

For #3, would you mind creating a new idea in the ideas portal (https://aka.ms/FabricIdeas)? definitely do specify if what you have in mind is a focus mode for that field, perhaps an expand gesture / action in the bottom right corner of the input box (like in this forum) or something else.

Thanks again! do feel free to post any other feedback or questions

[PR_I]

Who is in charge of this release? And why does he/she think it's a good idea to release it without the custom query?

[miguel]

Hi!

Thanks for the feedback. 

I'm one of the PMs behind this release and I hear your feedback loud and clear.

The overall native query generic implementation is a gap that we are aiming the address, but for the time being, when you need to use it, do feel free to revert back to the legacy experience.

This experience will only get better and it'll be thanks to your feedback 🙂 

Thanks again and please keep the feedback coming!

[jthom91]

Hi Miguel 

Just wanted to clarify something for you 

Custom query input is not a 'gap' in the new Get Data experience - it is a bug that renders the entire point of the tool useless. I'd gamble that most 'power-users' of PowerBI handling large datasets are pulling in data via these custom queries instead of doing transformations in PQ. 

It should *never* have shipped without this feature - It's honestly mindboggling how this managed to slip through the cracks, or get approval / final sign off.

I'm not trying to sling mud, just pointing out that this isn't as arbitrary as a 'gap' in the new experience. 

[miguel]

Thanks for the feedback and for trying out the tool, jthom91!

We are working on something to address this situation and we're hoping that it reaches the next release in June.

In terms of my comment around this being called a gap and not a bug, this is primarily from a purely technical standpoint from my side and apologies if that causes any confusion. For more context, what you see today in the preview of the "New Power Query experience" is fundamentally the experience that's available today in Power Query Online in products such as Power BI Dataflow Gen1, Fabric Dataflow Gen2, Power BI Web Modelling, Power Platform Dataflows and others. In Power Query Online, this implementation of the native query support for certified connectors (and connectors created through the Power Query SDK) is not yet available, hence why we call it a gap between the legacy UI and the modern UI, but it is something that we will be resolve and provide the needed support as it is and has been available in the legacy UI.

I thank you for your understanding on this! this feedback is crucial and helps prioritize things accordingly. Just to confirm, we intend to address this general gap for all certified connectors that support native query, but for the time being we do recommend using the legacy experience for that particular scenario. 

For any other scenario, please do let us know your feedback and what you think about the new OneLake catalog experience as well as the view on the Recents module.

Thanks again!

[dan_witkowski]

With the new version, when connecting to an ODBC source, there is no longer a drop-down menu to select the DSN

[Joshrodgers123]

We seemed to have lost the ability to enter a SQL query with the Snowflake connector. That's something we can't live without...