Forum Discussion
"How to prevent Power BI from converting text data?"
RickHantz, try disabling the two highlighted items in below image:
Otherwise, try the following:
When you load data into Power BI Desktop instead of clicking "Load", click "Edit" instead (which opens the Query Editor) and remove all steps after the "Source" or "Navigation" step (depending on if it's Excel or CSV, since Excel can have multiple sheets ,"Navigation" would be required to select the appropriate sheet whereas CSV's are only one sheet). By doing this, you will retain the source data without any modifications being done by Power BI automatically.
There is one to turn off auto date conversions, but not for EE.
Continued ContributorRickHantz, try disabling the two highlighted items in below image:
Otherwise, try the following:
When you load data into Power BI Desktop instead of clicking "Load", click "Edit" instead (which opens the Query Editor) and remove all steps after the "Source" or "Navigation" step (depending on if it's Excel or CSV, since Excel can have multiple sheets ,"Navigation" would be required to select the appropriate sheet whereas CSV's are only one sheet). By doing this, you will retain the source data without any modifications being done by Power BI automatically.
That seems to work, but now I need to manually specify row1 is the header row. How do I do that?
Editing the query lets me specify the two non-text columns as number, but I don't see how to specify the header row.
thanks for the help,
-RickH
Ok, I manually specified the header row, that works.
Then I edited the query for the two columns that have integers in them from text to number.
I now get an error saying it can't convert from text to number. We need to be able to sum those columns.