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!The Power BI Data Visualization World Championships is back! Get ahead of the game and start preparing now! Learn more
I have a column of many dollar values. I have confirmed none go below a penny. When summed, many values suddenly gain up to 30 decimal places. Rounding functions fail to clear the issue.
I have solved this problem with adding the "Precision.Decimal" argument to my List.Sum functions in a Group By step for one source where I need to preserve query folding, iaw another community forum post (and on a CSV source by setting the columns to fixed decimal/currency format). This is less than ideal as the Precision.Decimal argument is not visible in the GUI without opening advanced editor, and long story short such an arcane yet easy-to-stumble-into failure mode is going to be a political problem.
That said, my question is twofold:
1) Why does Power Query exhibit this behavior in floating point operations in the first place? Wasn't something like this a big scandal with the old Pentium I processors?
2) What do I tell the GUI-only, Power BI-skeptic analysts when they notice this happening, flip their $#!7 and try to go back to Excel?
Would you be willing to provide a pbix with the source file(csv?) so we can have a look at this please?
Not interested in the real data if it's private, just something that shows the issue please.
The Power BI Data Visualization World Championships is back! Get ahead of the game and start preparing now!
| User | Count |
|---|---|
| 19 | |
| 10 | |
| 9 | |
| 8 | |
| 7 |