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!Vote for your favorite vizzies from the Power BI Dataviz World Championship submissions. Vote now!
I continuously get this message below. And intermitently. Sometimes it works, sometimes it breaks. I am merging a query built from an excel file that lives on SharePoint with a query built from an online list on SharePoint.
Formula.Firewall: Query references other queries or steps and so may not directly access a data source. Please rebuild this data combination.
Solved! Go to Solution.
The issue appears to be in the permission settings. The SharePoint Online datasource was set to "Organizational" Privacy Levels. The Excel file was set to "None" Privacy Levels. By setting both to "Organizational" the queries built successfully.
Actually, I ended up hitting the issue again somewhere else, so Argh!
However, this time, I turned off parrallel loading and that seems to be the trick.
This blog post was very helpful in resolving. Though, mine is setup as he proposes here with SOURCE queries separated and still was hitting the issue. That's why I tried the disable parallel loading.
The issue appears to be in the permission settings. The SharePoint Online datasource was set to "Organizational" Privacy Levels. The Excel file was set to "None" Privacy Levels. By setting both to "Organizational" the queries built successfully.
Actually, I ended up hitting the issue again somewhere else, so Argh!
However, this time, I turned off parrallel loading and that seems to be the trick.
This blog post was very helpful in resolving. Though, mine is setup as he proposes here with SOURCE queries separated and still was hitting the issue. That's why I tried the disable parallel loading.
If you love stickers, then you will definitely want to check out our Community Sticker Challenge!
Check out the January 2026 Power BI update to learn about new features.
| User | Count |
|---|---|
| 2 | |
| 2 | |
| 2 | |
| 2 | |
| 1 |