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I'm currently working bringing in data from Azure Data Lake (ADLS Gen2) using Power Query and it takes several minutes to do simple changes like rename, reorder. Power query seems to be trying to refresh every single time I try to do a change and that just means I end up spending perhaps 70% of the time waiting.
I've tried filtering the data upfront but that didn't seem to have any effect.
Is there a trick to doing Power Query changes that make development faster, other than hand-coding everything in the Advanced editor. I'm hoping there is a better way at least for some of these simpler operations that don't actually require data to be pulled/transformed e..g rename, reorder, change type etc.
I think you need to wrap the first step with a (Table.Buffer) function and then everything will work quickly

From your description: "Power query seems to be trying to refresh every single time I try to do a change and that just means I end up spending perhaps 70% of the time waiting."
Disable Background Refresh for the current file while editing.
Disable Power Query background refresh - Power BI | Microsoft Learn
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