Early on when the SharePoint Online List 2.0 connector was released, I did some internet searching to see why you’d use the new connector vs the old connector. It turned up a lot of posts like this, where it was stated that the limit on the 2.0 connector was a maximum of 5000 returned rows.
I took that as gospel and essentially avoided using the 2.0 connector for YEARS, under the assumption that basically any list could easily grow over 5000 rows.
Here’s the feature we’re talking about, for reference, you choose between these when connecting to SharePoint Online list sources in Power BI.
Well… it turns out, it’s not limited to 5000 rows. Perhaps initially it had the limit and was removed? Who knows. Here’s my connection:
I tried both the 1.0 and 2.0 connectors on the same large list. It has 31,600 rows and about a dozen added columns. It loaded perfectly fine for both the 1.0 and 2.0 connector in under a minute.
So, when would you use 2.0 nowadays? When you want your column names to be imported as friendly names, mainly, that seems to be the big bonus… it also seems faster than 1.0 to me. I’m going to start using 2.0 as my default and see how it goes. 😊
Related Content
If you want to learn more about how to use SharePoint lists as a source in Power BI, I have a video on using the connector to expand person data and choice fields here.