Please see this thread. Power Query Changing Text Characters to Symbols - Microsoft Power BI Community - it contains a link to the user's Excel file that you can repro with
What is happening is when Power Query in Power BI imports the text in this Excel file, the data in being converted to ASCII symbols at the import. The user cannot modify this behavior. So data that looks like this:
is converted to this on the SOURCE line - no transformations were done, it was just imported incorrectly.
Note that if you open the Excel file and use Excel's Power Query to import the data, it is imported correctly. I have confirmed there are no formatting issues in the original excel file. copying all data to a new file as text only does not fix the issue.
6 Comments
This is a more widespread issue with the Power Query online connector for excel since 6th May.
Spent 90 minutes on a support call yesterday and was able to consistently repro the issue in dataflows online.
All data sources (web / public access) for the excel workbooks proven OK using desktop.
Confirmed Anonymous
