Power Query specifications and limits in Excel

Query name length

80 characters

Invalid characters in a query name

Double quotes (“), periods (.), leading or trailing whitespaces

Number of cells in a Query Editor data preview

3,000 cells

Navigation pane items displayed per level: databases per server and tables per database.

First 1,000 items in alphabetical order. You can manually add a non-visible item by modifying the formula for this step

Size of data processed by the Engine

Limited to available virtual memory (for 64-bit version) or about 1GB for 32-bit version, if data cannot be fully streamed, such as when sorting the data set locally before filling it

Number of columns per table

16,384

Maximum size of text in a preview cell

1M characters

Maximum size of text filled to Excel or data model

Not limited by Power Query

Maximum number of rows filled to worksheet

1,048,576

Soft limit of persistent cache. A soft limit can be exceeded for periods of time.

4GB

Individual entries in the cache

1GB

Compressed query and dependencies as stored in the connection string. For more information about how to display connection information, see Display connection information.

64K characters

Import from .xls and .xlsb workbooks.

255 columns

Import from xlsx workbooks.

No limit