This user's frustration is the story of modern data work in miniature. A workbook connection pulls 66,000 rows from Snowflake in ten seconds. Recreate that same connection as a Power Query, and the load time balloons to three or four minutes. The data is identical. The source is identical. The only difference is the tool chain. That 20x performance gap isn't a quirk; it's a signal. It tells us that traditional query architectures were never designed for the speed that modern analytics demands.
What happened here is instructive. The "fixed connection" bypasses Power Query's transformation engine and talks directly to the database. It's fast because it does almost nothing. The moment you route that same query through Power Query's interface, you inherit a layer of abstraction that was built for flexibility, not velocity. The result is a workflow that forces users to choose between speed and capability. You can have a fast, rigid connection that you cannot manipulate, or a slow, flexible query that you can. Neither option serves the user's actual goal: a maintainable setup that runs in seconds, not minutes.
This is where the promise of AI-native spreadsheets becomes concrete. The problem isn't that the user lacks technical skill. They have the connection string. They have the command text. They understand the architecture. The bottleneck is the tool itself. A spreadsheet designed for the age of cloud data platforms would not force that tradeoff. It would handle the query natively, preserving the ten-second refresh while giving the user full control over transformations and modeling. Speed and flexibility would not be competing priorities. They would be the same thing.
The practical takeaway is this: if your reporting setup forces you to choose between fast and functional, the tool is the problem. The user above spent time debugging a workaround for a limitation that should not exist. That time could have been spent analyzing the data. The next generation of spreadsheet tools should make that choice invisible. Your data deserves the speed it already has on the server. The spreadsheet should not be the slowest part of the stack.