power querry

Hi everyone,

I've run into a recurring issue: after refreshing a Power Query that's loaded into an Excel Table, a completely blank column sometimes appears that doesn't exist in the query output itself. In my case the table starts at cell B2, and the blank column shows up right next to my actual data.

My working hypothesis is that this happens when the number of columns returned by the query decreases compared to a previous refresh: Excel's Table object doesn't always shrink to match the new result, so it keeps a "ghost" column inherited from the previous load's structure. However, This behavior seems unpredictable: when I went from 10 columns down to 5, I could only got one extra blank column, not five.

Has anyone else experienced this? Is there a reliable way to force the Table to always match the query's current column count exactly, instead of refreshing on top of the old structure? And if the "ghost column" theory is right, why would only one extra column show up regardless of how many were actually dropped?

Thanks in advance!