There is a better way to handle this, and it starts with rethinking how you treat the refresh itself. The user's frustration is not about Power Query's mechanics; it's about the assumption that a refreshed to-do list should preserve the visual chaos of human sorting. When new tasks appear and the query re-runs, the order resets, and suddenly the checkboxes and comments seem to "jump." That is not a flaw in the tool. It is a signal that the sorting step is doing too much work.
The practical fix is to separate the act of refreshing from the act of ordering. Instead of relying on the query to maintain a specific sort after every update, build a stable key, like the ID plus week, and let that key be the anchor. Then, when the data refreshes, the new tasks land in their logical place, and the old ones stay put. The user already has the right idea with the unique identifier. The missing piece is making that identifier the first sort level, not the last. That way, even if someone filters or sorts the list manually, the next refresh brings everything back to a predictable, sensible order. It is not about preventing people from sorting; it is about giving them a safety net that makes the refresh feel less like a disruption.
This matters because the user's real goal is not to build a perfect query. It is to keep a team moving without losing track of what has been done. The checkbox and the comments are where the actual work lives. If those annotations get scrambled every time the master list changes, the tool becomes a source of friction instead of clarity. So the answer is not to abandon sorting or to lock the sheet down. It is to make the refresh idempotent, meaning no matter how many times it runs, the result is the same stable structure. That is what a good key gives you. It turns a chaotic update into a routine event.
The takeaway is simple: stop treating the refresh as the problem and start treating the sort as the symptom. Build your query around the unique identifier, let that be the primary sort, and then let users do what they want on top of it. When the next batch of tasks comes in, the list will reorder cleanly, the checkboxes will stay attached to the right rows, and the comments will not feel like they are playing musical chairs. That is not a technical hack. It is a design principle that respects the human work happening inside the spreadsheet.