Hi @russellw999,
You are right, there is no button to call the function Table.Buffer in Power Query (or List.Buffer for that matter)
Incorporating a buffer step won’t automatically mean performance gain, either.
I guess you could say there’s a trade off. Power Query uses streaming semantics for tables and lists, that means you don’t have to pull in all the data first, perform a transfromation on each element before it’s passed on to the next transformation. Instead it pulls data through the transfromations in a more streaming like fashion.
Table.Buffer can be useful if you want to store an intermediate result in memory and avoid pulling content from disk, a remote file share, a SQL Server, a website, or any other data source multiple times during an evaluation. You can think of Table.Buffer as, “load this full table into memory” (and make it immutable…)
Here’s an article I found informative.
i hope this is helpful.