Your fear is founded, and it is smart to trust that instinct. When you pull data through Power Query and place it beside manually maintained fields, you are building a fragile bridge between two worlds: one that refreshes and sorts itself, and one that stays exactly where you put it. The moment that source sheet rearranges its rows, your manual table will not follow the new order. It will sit there, silently misaligned, and you will only notice when a name, a number, or a decision lands in the wrong row. That is not a hypothetical risk. It is a certainty the first time someone on your team sorts by a column they think is harmless.
The good news is that you do not have to choose between live data and manual input. You can have both, but they cannot live side by side in separate tables. The solution is to stop treating the Power Query output as a standalone table and instead make it the raw material for a single, structured table where your manual fields live in the same rows as the refreshed data. In practice, this means you pull the live data into a staging area, then use a lookup formula or a helper column to bring the relevant values into your main table, where your manual fields also reside. When the source data refreshes and reorders, your manual entries stay attached to the right rows because they are keyed to a stable identifier, not to the visual position of the row.
This approach requires a shift in how you think about the refresh. You are not trying to keep two tables aligned. You are designing one table where the live data is a guest, and the manual fields are the permanent residents. The identifier, whether it is an ID, a date, or a unique combination of values, is what keeps everything honest. Without that anchor, any refresh is a gamble. With it, you can sort, filter, and rearrange to your heart's content, and your manual fields will follow their corresponding records like they are attached by a tether.
So, before you build another adjacent table, stop and ask yourself what unique value exists in every row of that source data. That value is your key. Use it to bring the live data into your working table, and keep your manual fields there. Then, when the refresh runs and the rows shuffle, you will not be holding your breath. You will be confident that your data and your annotations are still speaking the same language, row for row.