Setting and Maintaining a Default Sort in PQ?

[johnny51981]

Might just be a dream of mine, but thought I would ask.

I know PQ sets its own path for refreshing everything, does it come with a specific Sort that it sticks with OR does it just plunk it out however it is least resistant to its own processing? Is there a way in Editor to set a Sort and maintain it through the end of the query?

The reason I ask is because I am having to investigate why the data results where not accurate (realistic logic vs written logic, not a failure in the PQ), and I would like to maintain a Sort by our tracking ID number. If I set the Sort Rows at the start/top of the query, will that sort hold through to the last step that the sorted column exists?

 

[Matt Allington]

If you sort a column, it will stick, but there are some caveats. If you load into power pivot or power BI, there is, by definition, no sorting in the loaded data. If you load to an Excel table, sort will stick. Secondly, depending on your source data, you may need to load the entire table into memory to make the sort stick. I wrote about that in this article. Remove Duplicates and Keep the Last Record with Power Query