Power Query Editor Red/White striped bar

[Anonymous]

I am using the Power Query Editor to pull in data from an excel file stored on sharepoint. I noticed there is a red and white striped bar below some of my coulmn headers. What does this bar mean?

[splambo]

You might simply be seeing this red-and-white dotted bar because the file you use as a data source is open in another software, for example in Excel.

Close that file and refresh the preview in PowerBI, the line will change back to green.

[guh950]

I got this same issue twice. Once from mismatched datatypes in the column, and another time when I had queried too many rows from an excel file and the file kept crashing. In both instances, investigating the issue in greater detail helped me figure it out, although this issues isn't always going to tell you why its occurring.

[michellepace]

Hi Mike,

I purposefully "broke" my data connection and got this red-white dashed line in the effected Query. The line remained there until I fixed what I broke.

That is to say, in power query editor I was connecting to a table in my excel file named sales_2018. I then opened my excel file and change the table name to sales_hello. Once I clicked refresh in power query editor, the query "sales_2018" got that red-and-white candy line below it. Obviously an indication that something is broken. I had to click on the query, then choose "Navigation" in the applied steps, and click on my newly named table - sales_hello. After that the red and white candy stripe disappeared. 

Cheers,

Michelle

[artemus · Accepted solution]

It means errors were detected in some rows. Note that this takes a bit to update and may refer to a previous iteration you did.

Similarly blue means data, while black means empty/null 

[MacJulian]

Is there a documentation which colour mean what? 

I saw now a few different colour variants but I don't know what it means. 

[akkitek]

@MacJulian I found this documentation: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-query/data-profiling-tools