Join us at FabCon Atlanta from March 16 - 20, 2026, for the ultimate Fabric, Power BI, AI and SQL community-led event. Save $200 with code FABCOMM.
Register now!The Power BI Data Visualization World Championships is back! It's time to submit your entry. Live now!
After spending well over an hour chasing a very stubborn SyntaxError, I found out that the Table.InsertRows function in M Query does not work for columns containing a '+' (I mean the plus sign, not the quotes) in the name. While many other functions (I obviously didn't test them all), do work perfectly with a + in the columnname, this one does not.
The difference as far as I can tell is probably that most other functions that take one or more columnnames as an argument, demand the columnname(s) to be written in between double-quotes. The Table.InsertRows function however does not.
I.m.h.o. this is nothing less than a bug, since it never stated that (although maybe it is not considered to be very good programming practice) a '+' sign is not allowed in a column name.
My question therefore is: Can we either allow or disallow the '+' as part of a columnname, but please draw one line for all functions, as I can now change a part of my report again. I know for a fact that I will not use it again. 🙂
Thank you,
Best regards,
Niels
Solved! Go to Solution.
Hi @C4YNelis,
The field name in a record literal has to be an identifier, and vanilla identifiers can't contain plus signs.
However, you can include any characters you want by using an escaped identifier.
[#"Customer+ID" = 2]
Best Regards,
Qiuyun Yu
Dear @v-qiuyu-msft,
I just tried your suggestion and it works like a charm. I never knew it was possible to escape a columnname this way. I thought this was a reserved table syntax.
Thank you for your time and efforts!
Cheers,
Niels
Hi @C4YNelis,
The field name in a record literal has to be an identifier, and vanilla identifiers can't contain plus signs.
However, you can include any characters you want by using an escaped identifier.
[#"Customer+ID" = 2]
Best Regards,
Qiuyun Yu
Hi @C4YNelis,
I have sent a email to consult this issue internally, will update here once I get any information.
Best Regards,
Qiuyun Yu
The Power BI Data Visualization World Championships is back! It's time to submit your entry.
| User | Count |
|---|---|
| 47 | |
| 45 | |
| 33 | |
| 33 | |
| 30 |
| User | Count |
|---|---|
| 136 | |
| 116 | |
| 58 | |
| 58 | |
| 56 |