Speed up Power Query by allowing to break the refresh chain

Although we can use quite a couple of methods to speed up slow queries (I've collected some of them here: Speed/Performance aspects – The BIccountant ), one current limitation for query refresh speed lies in the fact that PQ will always evaluate all steps back to the source to determine the "query plan".



I've tested quite a couple of scenarios where I staged intermediate results into static csv files or sheets in Excel and the performance improvements have been enormous.

So what would be really great is that instead of having to create these workarounds, we could edit a property of a query step so its result would be evaluated as a first step and then stored in cache before continuing to evaluate the further steps.



Actually, maybe even opt for a "bring your own datalake"-version where we can store to Azure Blob if the data is too large for the cache. But in a way, that refresh is properly synchronized.