Maximum text length

[vincent_1234]

Dear developers,

I've imported data from a plain sql server table. One column contains many characters, however according the documentation this should not be an issue.

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-desktop-data-types/#text-type

However when reading data, I am limited to 32766 characters, which is an issue for me. How could this be and how could I overcome this?

With kind regards

[Anonymous]

hi @vincent_1234

did you ever solve this issue?

thanks

[Greg_Deckler]

I wonder if this is a limitation of Power Query "M" versus the Desktop data model types. In other words, the data model Text type can theoretically support large amounts of text but the import process using Power Query is truncating it to 32,766 characters.

[Anonymous]

Hi  @Greg_Deckler ,

I think I am experiencing the scenario that you have just described. Power Query appears to truncate to 32K characters.

Is there a solution for this?

Thanks

[vincent_1234]

I tried importing in Excel and it's the same, text is cut off.

However the Excel limitations are clear about this https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Excel-specifications-and-limits-16c69c74-3d6a-4aaf-ba35-e6e...

Could this be the same for PowerBI?

Power Query has the same specs as Power BI, with much larger "Maximum size of text in a preview cell", however this being an Excel plugin, how do they come up with that. The results are still limited to 32767 chars

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Power-Query-specifications-and-limits-5fb2807c-1b16-4257-aa...

[Greg_Deckler]

Hmm, I would post this as an issue and supply the references you cite and ask "What gives?".

https://ideas.powerbi.com/forums/360879-issues

All the references you cite indicate that you should be able to have more than 32,767 characters in a text cell so that says there is a bug or issue somewhere. Would be interested to hear if you get any feedback on it.

[vincent_1234]

No answers yet, but it seems to be a kind of API limit.

The text in the cell is the actual size, however the data I receive in the custom visual is limited

[vross]

Interesting, I'd be happy with 32k.  My text is being limited to only 1024.  Same whether I pull the data from a linked Excel sheet or through a .csv file.  Wanted to use power query to join two relatively short tables with text values and it's been a complete fiasco, since I handed the finished product off only to find out that the text columns were truncated.

What I've tried.

both Excel and csv

setting the type to Any and Text, neither of which made any difference.

[vross]

Ok, this is difficult to debug, since the preview in the query editor only shows the first 1024 characters, but the issue may be limited to data from linked Excel tables.  So to duplicate, dump >1024 characters in a cell, create a table, "Add to Data Model", then "Close & Load Too..." back into a new sheet.