New Table greyed out...

[joglidden]

Why is 'New Table' greyed out (unavailable) in one pbi desktop file but not another? It seems so random. I can't find a reason for this. Any insight would be appreciated.

[KHorseman]

The only way I can find to get New Table to grey out is if I connect live to a sql server instead of importing. Direct connect does not support very much in the way of creating local stuff inside the pbix file. New table appears to be one of the things not supported.

[joglidden]

I think that's the reason. Now that I look at my files, all the ones where I can create a table have an excel file, or text stream as a data source, and the one with only a SQL Server data source (direct query) is the one where I cannot create a table. But why won't it let me create another empty table, just as a place to store my measures? Thanks for the response.

[v-qiuyu-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi @joglidden,

In the DirectQuery mode, no data is imported or copied into Power BI Desktop, and all tables must come from a single database. Due to the nature of the DirectQuery mode, we are not able to create a new table. Currently, we can only use DAX expressions to create calculated columns or measures in this mode. For more information, please refer to this article: Use DirectQuery in Power BI Desktop.

If you have any feedback about DirectQuery mode, you can submit an idea in Power BI Ideas forum.

Best Regards,
Qiuyun Yu

[Anonymous]

Turn the composite Model feature on. For this, go to File > Options & Settings> Composite Model.

[joglidden]

Thank you for explaining this to me. I wanted to create a table to organize my measures, so the real problem here is organizing and managing measures. I hope that Power BI eventually comes up with a better approach for this.