Renamed columns causing error

[SaganBigRedDog]

Hi,

We have a report the is pulled from SalesForce.  One column in this report was previously named "Sales Rep."  last week, we changed the wording to "Sales Representative" (only renamed it, did not create a new column.)  I get the below error on my PBI reports that use this field now.  I tried renaming the columns to "sales representative" but still receive the error.  How do I get PBI to recognize the name column name without removing the data source altogether?

[v-yuezhe-msft]

@SaganBigRedDog,

Based on your screenshot, the error occurs in Power BI Desktop. Do you create report in Power BI Desktop and publish the report to Power BI Service? If so, in Query Editor of Power BI Desktop, look into “APPLIED STEPS”, some steps should make changes/calculation on the ‘Sales Rep’ column(e.g. Change Type), you should delete such steps to solve the issue.

However, if you directly connect to SalesForce in Power BI Service, when you have schema changes(e.g. rename column) in the data source, you will receive the error like “The column ‘Sales Rep’ of the table wasn’t found”. You would need to remove the dataset in Power BI Service and re-connect to SalesForce.

Regards,
Lydia

[Greg_Deckler]

That's really odd, renaming columns hasn't been an issue in Power BI for forever. Used to be really annoying. Where did you do the renaming, in Desktop or Query Editor? And you say that you tried renaming it back and it didn't fix the issue?

[SaganBigRedDog]

Hi,

To clarify,  the renaming issue is stemming from a field that was renamed in Sales Force.  It seems like pBI is still looking for the old name of the column. To resolve, I renamed the column in PBI (to match the new Sales Force field name). This was done on the desktop version (where the error was received).  It did not work and is still searching for the old column name.

[Greg_Deckler]

Hmmm. Yeah, I can see how that might be problematic. Are you able to trace back where the error is happening and perhaps change the formula? Distributed data governance is hard.

[SaganBigRedDog]

Hm there isn't actually a formula that is being used.  It's not a calculated column.  It's the exact column that fed over from Sales Force.

[Greg_Deckler]

OK, so are you using the Salesforce connector in the Desktop or Get Data from the Service?

[SaganBigRedDog]

Using Get Data from the Service

[CoderZen08]

Hi @SaganBigRedDog were you able to find a solution? As a workaround, maybe you can try to test your connection with a 3rd party connector, which pulls data directly from SF objects. I've tried windsor.ai, supermetrics and funnel.io. I stayed with windsor because it is much cheaper so just to let you know other options. In case you wonder, to make the connection first search for the Salesforce connector in the data sources list:

After that, just grant access to your Salesforce account using your credentials, then on preview and destination page you will see a preview of your Salesforce fields:

There just select the fields you need. It is also compatible with custom fields and custom objects, so you'll be able to export them through windsor.  Finally, just select PBI as your data destination and finally just copy and paste the url on PBI --> Get Data --> Web --> Paste the url.