Forum Discussion
Help please, Filtered File Folder import still evaluates contents of files filtered out
That solved nothing. Using the folder import function provides a list of files with all of their file properties. This also includes the binaries themselves, and it appears PQ takes the time to load those binaries before you have had an opportunity to filter them from the list. It seems strange as you haven't yet defined how to translate the files yet (i.e. excel, csv, txt, ...). Regardless, in the end I built a Python to run in the background to copy out the current year files to a separate folder. This duplicates data, not what I wanted, but I moved on.
Power Query does NOT load the binaries until you open them on the initial load, so you can easily filter out data. It depends on where the files are being loaded from too. For example, by default, if you load files from SharePoint, it uses the SharePoint.Files() connector. But if you change it to SharePoint.Contents(), it can be much MUCH faster as it only has to load the metadata for the files in a specific folder, not the entire site.