Skip to main content
cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Level up your Power BI skills this month - build one visual each week and tell better stories with data! Get started

Reply
RZ
Frequent Visitor

Unexpected behaviour in Power Query

Hello,

 

I have a Power BI report that connects to variouys data sources (files, API)  and brings them together. I made some changes yesterday, And I started getting dataformat.error's during refresh. The error is not  associated with one row. Instead the whole step fails. After some backward steps to identify the issue , now I am at a stage where I am getting the error

 

 

DataFormat.Error: We couldn't convert to Number.
Details:
    True

 

 

at the sorting step where I was hoping to find some problematic data... 

 

RZ_0-1685689429606.png

 

The immediate step before refreshes fine. It s the step where I converted the values to text in order to debug if something was wrong with the data I have,,,

 

RZ_1-1685689463975.png

 

Any suggestions? 

 

Thanks...

Ruchan 

 

3 REPLIES 3
RZ
Frequent Visitor

Well it turned out to be one of the export files had missing columns, so some columns had mismatching type of data which was failing a group by step. I am not sure that expains Power BI behaviour though...

RZ
Frequent Visitor

I will now start to remove data sources one by one and see what happens. I  was expecting a magic solution like "OK the cached data must have been corrupt..   Click ctrl-alt-shift refresh and see if that solves it..."  

lbendlin
Super User
Super User

That is indeed weird.  Can you provide sample data in usable format (not as a screenshot) ?

Helpful resources

Announcements
April Power BI Update Carousel

Power BI Monthly Update - April 2026

Check out the April 2026 Power BI update to learn about new features.

Fabric SQL PBI Data Days

Data Days 2026 coming soon!

Sign up to receive a private message when registration opens and key events begin.

New to Fabric survey Carousel

New to Fabric Survey

If you have recently started exploring Fabric, we'd love to hear how it's going. Your feedback can help with product improvements.

Power BI DataViz World Championships carousel

Power BI DataViz World Championships - June 2026

A new Power BI DataViz World Championship is coming this June! Don't miss out on submitting your entry.