How to use Microsoft Lists in Power BI - including multi-value fields! (2025) ✅

[@bi-ome]

Someone pointed out that you don't need to set the relationship to bidirectional if you create a measure like this to measure by your dimension - good tip! Tasks by Assignee = CALCULATE( COUNTROWS(Tasks), RELATEDTABLE('Task Assignees') )

[@IllinoisREI23]

This has been a huge help! Thank you so much for walking through so many little tips on formatting the data and how to get things to show up better. Taking data from Lists and making it digestible in Power Bi has been exactly what I'm working on so this is awesome timing for me!

[@bi-ome]

Awesome! I'm so glad it helped. Lists in Power BI has been one of my fav things to do in projects. It's a really great way to make something that amounts to a glorified Excel sheet into something that looks really impressive, haha.

[@Alan.DL7]

Nice info! Really useful especially if not having access to proper sources of data for your report.

[@bi-ome]

Yeah, not everyone is a data engineer or has a pocket data engineer - this is not “big data”, it’s more for citizen developers that don’t have access to a data warehouse.

[@daveboylan247]

Hi Christine! Thanks again for your excellent work! I'm an old timer but I always learn something new from your channel (is ODBC still a thing?). Your timing couldn't be better, as I'm migrating my Microsoft Forms process to Microsoft Lists. I'm just holding off until Microsoft adds conditional branching to their list forms. Keep up the great work, and have a blessed day!

[@bi-ome]

I have been hoping for conditional branching on Lists for YEARS, it's awesome that they are finally doing it! I used to try to do surveys in the classic SharePoint survey app, it was so clunky. Thank you for your kind words!

[@colbym72]

This is so helpful. Thank you very much. For multi-select columns, is getting comma-separated values necessary for proper filtering? That step was a bit confusing for my novice brain

[@FRANKWHITE1996]

Wanted to subscribe but already did last time 🎉😅

[@bi-ome]

😄

[@jlp0165]

I use a SharePoint list with only 5 columns and over 20,000 rows that grows every day. Power BI takes a very long time to refresh and makes the report inconvenient for users when they need to see recent data. Is there a way to improve the refresh time of a Power BI report connected to a large SharePoint list? Thanks!

[@bi-ome]

Make sure you use a “remove other columns” step first in your query to remove any fields you don’t need, and keep the number of applied steps minimal. Also make sure you’re using the 2.0 connector (though switching is a pain because the field names come out different, just a heads up). 1.0 was the default for a long time so if you created it a ways back that may be a big part of it.

[@assiabouhadouza1927]

I’m desperate I have a column with List mentioned but I don’t have the expand arrow. Even chat gpt was not able to help 😢😢 any suggestion or workaround please ?

[@bi-ome]

What type of column is it? Some of them will appear twice in the query editor, one that’s pre-expanded and one that’s not (not next to each other)