Power Query specifications and limits

Note: Power Query is known as Get & Transform in Excel 2016. Information provided here applies to both. To learn more, see Get & Transform in Excel 2016.

Feature	Limitation
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

Display connection information

1. In the DATA ribbon tab, click Connections.

2. In the Workbook Connections dialog box, select a connection and click Properties to display the Connection Properties dialog box. For more information, see Connection properties.