The ultimate Fabric, Power BI, SQL, and AI community-led learning event. Save €200 with code FABCOMM.
Get registeredCompete to become Power BI Data Viz World Champion! First round ends August 18th. Get started.
I have a little "candy-cane" error indicator that is displayed over the top of my PQ script. See below
In modern programming environments, errors are pretty important. They shouldn't remain as an annotation that someone can choose to ignore. In fact most errors result in data that is inaccurate, and it seems likely that a Power BI developer would want to avoid working with this inaccurate data!
Is there a presentation of these errors somewhere in this PQ environment? Is the candy-cane there to indicate to lead me to another place where the error is presented?
I realized that I can click about in the PQ steps and probably discover more information that way. I realize also that I can use the "start diagnostics" tool as a starting point for investigation. However, the PQ editor clearly knows that it received an error already, and I just want it to share that with me, in a slightly more meaning format than a "candy-cane".
Where are the actual error messages presented? Is there an error panel, or output window that I'm missing?
Hello @dbeavon3 , the learn.microsoft article found within the Power Query documentation discusses dealing with errors in Power Query (updated March 2024). In Power Query, you may encounter two types of errors: step-level and cell-level. The article provides suggestions for fixing the most common errors at each level and describes the error reason, error message, and error detail for each.
There are a great many resources online. You may wish to venture over to LinkedIn, and EnterpriseDNA and similar well known sources for resources and inspiration.
The latest definitive text on Power Query (M) would be The Definitive Guide to Power Query (M): Mastering Complex Data Transformation with Power Query (Packt Publishing (March 29, 2024)) authored by @Greg_Deckler, Greg Deckler (Author), Rick de Groot (@Rickmaurinus) (Author), Melissa de Korte (Author) (@m_dekorte ), Brian Julius (Forward) .
Each of the contributors is an expert and instructor, and are very active in the community.
=-=-=-=-=-
If you find this insightful, please provide a Kudo and accept this as a solution.
Hi @foodd
Thansk for that information.
I'm wondering if there is a centralized panel, or output window where any relevant errors would be presented. Eg. is there a quick way to show the full mashup logs that correspond to the alert (candy-cane)?
It seems like Power BI makes us do an easter-egg hunt to poke around until we find the source of the error.
That is a pretty uncommon approach for software developers. In most programming environments, the error "comes to us" (eg bubbles up and crashes the app). It is very HARD to miss the errors when they are happening. However in Power BI we have to go digging for the errors ourselves. The candy-cane presentation is showing us that something bad happened, but it makes us do all the work to find out what that was!
I would love to have a centralized output window, or mashup log that was always presented to us at the end of every refresh ... ESPECIALLY if errors are encountered. I was hoping there is something in the PQ experience that I'm missing, but it sounds unlikely.