Advance your Data & AI career with 50 days of live learning, dataviz contests, hands-on challenges, study groups & certifications and more!
Get registeredJoin 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.
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.