Column as list type

[Syndicate_Admin]

A row is a single customer that contains multiple comma separated categories in a single column.  I'd like to treat this column as an array/list rather than splitting each category into new rows.  The entire table needs to be exportable via a paginated report, and splitting categories into new rows will cause duplicated customers. 

Categories are used in a slicer, so the slicer needs to filter based on contains a category, rather than an exact match, otherwise all 200+ possible combinations of categories in the column show up in the dropdown, and a user will have to select each occurrence of a category in order for all customers tagged with a category to show up.  Is there a contains setting for slicers?

[lbendlin]

Power BI cannot handle lists or records (unlike Power Query). You need to split and/or unpivot your source data to arrive at primitive column types.