Level: Advanced The EARLIER() and EARLIEST() functions are 2 of the harder functions in DAX to get your head around. If you come from a programming background it will probably be easy for you. However as I have repeatedly stated on my blog, one of the many great things about […]
Level: Intermediate I was helping someone on a forum recently and I thought the question and solution would make an interesting blog article. I have adapted the scenario to work with Adventure Works customer purchases, but this concept would work equally well across other entities, such as sales territories, calendar […]
Level: Intermediate–Advanced I have covered the topic of Lineage in DAX a few times in the past (within other articles). Today I thought I would write a single post dedicated to lineage. As you may know, Power BI has a number of different operation modes, some of which do not […]
Regular readers of my blog probably get sick of hearing me rave about the latest new thing in Power BI. This month there is an absolute cracker – Q&A in Power BI Desktop. In case you don’t know, Q&A is a natural language query tool that allows you to ask […]
Level: Intermediate I have been aware of the TREATAS function for a very long time. I have tried to understand how it works a few times but could never really work it out. I think part of the problem is the function name TREATAS is not very descriptive. To contrast […]
Where has Matt been? Before teaching you how to pass an Excel parameter to Power Query, I’ll have a few words. Regular readers of my blog may have noticed I have been missing in action over the last month. I have been super busy with the PUG World Tour, delivering […]
Level: Intermediate Background I was reading the questions at http://community.powerbi.com today and saw an interesting question. In short the OP wanted to know if there was a way to identify (via a measure) if the row in a table had a colour =”Blue”, but also to check that there were […]
I first learnt about the new DAX UNICHAR function in Power BI by reading Chris Webb’s blog (which was also the inspiration for this article today). One of the uses of the UNICHAR function is to be able to include non text characters inside visuals. When you combine a logical set of […]
Level: Intermediate The variable feature in DAX has been around for more than a year and I have simply never got around to writing an article about it – I am changing that today. Let me start off with some version information and syntax and then I will show you are […]
Level: Beginners As I often say, sometimes it is the little things that can make a big different for some people – in this case Accountants. I was teaching a Power BI class a few weeks ago and I was discussing how the number formatting options work in Power BI. […]
Level: Advanced I was helping someone on Power Pivot Forum last week with a tricky calculated column question. As an aside, you may know that I always advise beginners to keep away from calculated columns. You mostly don’t need calculated columns because in most circumstances a measure is a better […]
Level: Beginners/Intermediate In the August 2017 update of Power BI Desktop Microsoft released the new What If feature (first demonstrated at MDIS in July). This new What If capability uses two new DAX functions to complete a task that you have always been able to do manually. You still can […]
I have written a series of articles over the last few years including: What is Power BI What is Power Query What is Power Pivot But I have never written an article about the DAX language, so I thought I would cover this off today. What is DAX? DAX is […]
Update 21 Feb 2018: There are 2 versions of this localhost workbook. One works with the downloadable version of Power BI Desktop and the other works with the Microsoft App Store version. There were some technical issues in late 2017, but as at Feb 2018 everything seems to be working […]
I have written articles before about how you can extract measures from a data model using DAX Studio and also using Power Pivot Utilities. These are both excellent tools in their own right and I encourage you to read up on those previous articles to learn more about these tools. […]
The 24th of July, 2017 is the second birthday for Power BI. I thought I would take the occasion of its second birthday to reflect on all the great work that the crack Power BI team at Microsoft has done over the last year. I think it would be […]
Level: Intermediate In this article I am going to write about the ALL() function, show how it works and explain a common use case. I will also cover the unexpected behaviour that occurs when using the ALL() function in Power BI Desktop – more on that later. For this article I […]
Level: Intermediate Sometime late in 2016 Microsoft deployed a new “Combine” feature in both Power Query for Excel (Get and Transform) and also in Power BI Desktop (Get Data). The new capability makes it easier to combine multiple copies of similar workbooks into a single table without hand coding M Functions, […]
When I was at the Microsoft Data Insights Summit last week I took the opportunity to catch up with Howie Dickerman to get an update on how the bug fixing with Power Pivot for Excel is coming along. I talked about this in my original blog here and then my […]
Level: Beginners/Intermediate As those that read my blog regularly would know, I have been at the Microsoft Data Insights Summit in Seattle Washington for the last 2 days. I had the privilege and pleasure of presenting two sessions at the event. For those that were not able to attend, here […]